My final project is focused on food and how it connects us. In my family and culture, we often make chai (an Indian tea) as a way to say “hello” and converse over the drinking of chai. I also feel as if making this drink connects me to my own culture, growing up in a family of immigrants in America I could always bond with my mom over brewing this warm and spicy drink. To show this idea in my project, I created a two-player mini game in JavaScript with a Makey-Makey controller so users can bond and work together over making some digital chai.

The premise of the mini-game is slider based. So for each step in the recipe of making chai, players have to get their circles as close together as they can to get maximum points and make the best chai. The circles slide across the slider at increasing speeds for each recipe step.

The first thing I focused on was creating the illustrations for my game. I used Adobe Illustrator to create illustrations for each step in the recipe of chai. I used this recipe online to reference off of as it provided some visuals to reference for each step of the recipe: https://minimalistbaker.com/easy-masala-chai-recipe/.

After creating the illustrations, I then worked on getting my game idea into code. I have never coded in JavaScript before so it was a bit of a learning curve, but I believe I was able to achieve everything I wanted to in the time I had. The hardest part of the code was figuring out the slider mechanism for the game. Eventually when I figured out this mechanism the rest of the game was pretty easy to make. One thing I couldn’t figure out though was gif animations, every time I tried adding an animation to a recipe step it glitched and started flickering on the screen so I ended up not having any animations.

Finally, I added some audio and sound effects. I used the Animal Crossing 3AM theme as I felt the cute music fit the game. I also added some cooking sound effects for every recipe step.

If I had more time, I’d probably try and see if I could get the animations working for the game as I think they really add to it! I’d also probably improve the input device, I was originally going to use arcade buttons but they didn’t ship in time.

 

Link to documentation/demo video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHlWJiZt5kE