A VR nutrition-planning game prototype where players role‑play as chefs—assessing a customer’s needs, choosing ingredients, and assembling meals to build empathy and nutrition literacy.
Built as a personal exploration of how immersive role‑play could make nutrition learning more engaging and memorable by shifting it from static guidelines to practice-based decision-making.
End-to-End UX
Game Concept
Unity Prototyping
Year
Self-initiated
Motivation & Hypothesis
I built Midnight Chef to explore a question:
Can role‑play and hands‑on interaction make nutrition education feel less instructional and more intrinsically motivating for kids?
Nutrition guidance is often taught as static guidelines and categories. I wanted to reframe learning as identity + empathy: kids aren’t “studying nutrition,” they’re being the chef making choices for someone with real needs.
Cooking became the core mechanic because meal planning turns abstract nutrition into concrete decisions with clear tradeoffs (preferences, constraints, consequences)—a natural setup for learning through practice, not passive content consumption.
The Approach
For this minimum viable prototype, I focused specifically on the dish-planning stage of cooking. Building an entire cooking simulation would be complex—and many great cooking games already exist.
Instead, I explored how players could role-play as a chef, planning meals for others based on their needs.
This allowed me to emphasize empathy, nutrition, and strategy without overcomplicating the mechanics as a solo developer and designer.
Key Design Decisions
2 - leverage real-world intuition over 2D UI
Replaced floating 2D panels with a physical cookbook.
3 - keep attention in world
Surface nutrition insights at the moment of ingredient selection
4 - Make serving a shared emotional payoff
Designed the final step as a shared payoff. Collaborating with other characters and celebrating the customers’ reactions. Let empathy and joy reinforce the learning loop.
Collaboration
Collaborate and divide tasks with another chef.
Serve
In the final step, players serve the dish to the customers. A future update is considered to add conversation and eating reactions to make the moment more rewarding.
Credits
As a solo developer and designer, I'm grateful for the Creative Commons materials and purchasable assets that allowed me to focus on building the experience. Credits for the 3D models, illustrations, and portions of the scripts can be found here in my notes.
Special thanks to Unity expert and instructor Indika Wijesooriya for helping me tackle technical solutions.
