Overview
Covert Chef is a stealth cooking hybrid game where you play as a hungry restaurant-goer who just can't wait any longer for his food. Sneak into the busy kitchen and collect all of the ingredients needed to make your delicious meal. Cut, dice, wash, and cook your ingredients by completing minigames in real time whilst avoiding the already frustrated kitchen staff. Get detected and you're going to be waiting even longer for that meal.

Covert Chef was the prototype that I used for my final year project dissertation. The dissertation looked into the feasibility of having a game that blended elements of both the stealth and cooking genre and whether people enjoyed this fusion and if there was any market demand for this kind of game. The game was an interesting experiment for me to show off my designer skills by identifying why I thought these two genres would work well together. Ultimately the key element was patience and timing. Memorising the patrol routes of the kitchen staff and the best time to initiate the minigames was interesting idea that I thought could have legs.

Additionally, I used this project as part of my psychology in design module, where we had to add psychological elements to a previous project and analyse their effect on the player. I added an achievements/challenges page to the game's menu to encourage replayability for the game. Several pyschological methods are used such as having the first achievement be one that people would just naturally get so that they had an invested cause for going after the others. Similarly, the difficulty for the achievements are colour coded to gauge how difficult they are and with increasingly more tangible rewards.

Roles and Responsibilities
This was a solo project so I was responsible for everything. This involved planning ahead and creating a timeline of project milestones so that I could review and judge whether I was on track for the project. I had to plan out and design the minigames, the art style, the level design, the progression mechanics, sound design, and story. 

Challenges
This was a large undertaking for myself as I also had to code all of the mechanics and enemy AI which was challenging but rewarding. Likewise, I also had to create a testing form that would be given to playtesters and document their feedback for the experience. This was a great learning experience to see how people played the game differently to myself.

Outcome
I got a 65 for this module. I got some good feedback from the playtesters about the player movement and the enemy patrol and vision cones being too unforgiving. These have since been adjusted to make the player turn much faster and smoother as well as make the enemy behaviour more obvious and give the player slightly longer to escape. I am pleased with how the game turned out but I definitely would like to spend some time to make it more polished (especially with the UI) and add additional features that were cut such as a rating system, consumable food items that can be used to manipulate guard behaviour, different types of kitchen staff, and upgradable skills and tools.