This game was built to support our new cooking show for kids (age 3-6) I Can Cook. The idea was to design a game that could demonstrate to children some of the activities found within cooking and to give them a sense of the steps required to complete different recipes. We used real recipes found in the show with a general guiding ambition to provide an experience that could, in some small way, replace actually getting message in the kitchen. In the game the recipes themselves are broken down to 5 of their basic actions and each of these has a small mini-game built around them – not unlike the seminal cooking mama series. Children are encouraged to move the moue or hit the spacebar at key times to enable animations to play.

We had great access to the I Can Cook production team in the making of the game and were able to get the show’s iconic presenter Katy Ashworth (@KatyAshworth) to provide voice over for the whole game – which really helped to make the game special.

I’m particuarly happy with the art direction of this game, which was provided by a long time Endemol collaborator Matt McFaul (@jambamatt). Something must have clicked with the online audience too as the game was a big success on the cbeebies website. The BBC commissioned us to produce games for a further 5 recipes, which went live in August 2010, the game remains a firm favourite on the Cbeebies site.