For Grown-Ups

Welcome to our design letter

Dear Grown-Up,

Cooking is fun, but more importantly PLAYING with food is fun! There are so many exciting variables at play that can make handling food so satisfying; its consistency and feel, how it sounds when you slice it, its texture, and especially the taste of it. Tasting in itself can be such an adventure – when was the last time you ate something so hot it made your ears red? Or have you ever been served something so delicious that you couldn’t help yourself from putting it in your mouth without letting it cool off first?

Just thinking about all these things made us hungry to explore food play even further than we did in the original Toca Kitchen. So we decided to make a sequel! And we invited a cast of all new dinner guests for all you aspiring chefs out there to cook for. Or to try out your silliest recipes on. They’ll eat or drink almost anything you put in front of them.

So put on your apron and chef’s hat: you’re needed in the kitchen once more!

Bon appétit!
Mårten Brüggemann, Play Designer

How to play

The purpose of the app is to cook food and feed it to a character of your choice. As you select a character you’ll arrive in the kitchen. To the left you can open the fridge. This is where all food items can be found. You can drag out food items to the table, or directly into the mouth of the character you’ve selected. The character will be sitting at the table just waiting to be served or, more correctly, fed.

To the right there is a tool shelf that can be opened. Here you will find all the tools available to prepare your food. You may choose any tool you want in whatever order you like. You can choose tools either by tapping them or by dragging a food item to them. This will open the selected tool. The different tools are:

The cutting board – slice the food items by swiping them
The juicer – mix food items together to get delicious (or disgusting) drinks
The frying pan – fry your food
The cooking pot – cook your food into the perfect consistency
The oven – baking your food makes it steaming hot
The deep fryer – deep fry anything

In the lower right corner there’s a button to bring up the tray. In the tray you will find condiments and seasonings of different types. Use these to spice up your dishes! In the tray you can also place food you’ve prepared so that you can use it in different contexts. Perfect for those complicated dishes! While you are using a tool and want to bring something that you left out on the table you will find these food items waiting for you in the tray as well.

What to talk about

In Toca Kitchen 2 there are a several characters to choose from. Can you figure out who likes what? And why do you think they don’t like certain types of food? What do you like? There are also various ways of making food taste better; cooking it, putting some salt on it or even blending it with something else. This way you might be able to get someone to like something better than they first thought! Putting something in the juicer is a fun way of playing with food in new consistencies. Did anyone say fish-smoothie?

The characters may also react in unexpected ways when feeding them prepared food. Did that character just sneeze? How come? And how would you react if you ate something really, really hot?

Settings
In the Settings panel of your Apple device, there is an icon for Toca Kitchen 2. You can set the app to only include vegetarian food here. There are also options for showing the “Toca News” and “For Grown-Ups” buttons on the start screen as well as an option for toggling the music playback on and off. Please note that some of these settings may require the application to be restarted to take effect.