Game WIP: Cake Chaos

The Inspo

If you’ve played Paper Mario on the N64, hopefully you made it to the part where you have to bake a cake as Princess Peach for the super fat Shy Guy. What a fever dream. Cake Chaos is my love letter to that lil mini game. It’s a messy, pixelated, 1980s-inspired baking simulator.

I have no game development experience. A decade ago I was making silly lil games on Scratch, and I would’ve been perfectly happy staying in that lane but then we had to make a video for Skateboard Trick, and I thought, “Wouldn’t it be cool if we were playing a skateboard video game in the video?” David thought so too. He thought he could build it. He got started. But... do you see a skateboard game anywhere?

If you want something done, you have to do it yourself. But skateboards do not inspire me. Not one bit. Cake, though? Oh yeah. Fully motivated.

The Idea

You drop into a side-scrolling kitchen and are immediately tasked with baking a birthday cake ASAP. Why? Could be for your unhinged boss. Could be because a raccoon threatened your family. Could be because you're on a cooking show with a live audience. TBD.

You’ll have a time limit to find all the ingredients and supplies, combine them in a logical order, bake the cake (correctly, or not) and decorate it with flair.

There will be lots of chances for failure, because failure is funny. Want to bake your cake in the microwave? Go ahead... I’m not cleaning it up. Want to use ice cream instead of cream? That might actually work. Slay, queen.

Every item should be interactive. And eventually, there will be multiple levels, each with its own cake-related crisis.

The Process

This all started with a vibe and zero planning. I downloaded Godot (pronounced “guh-dough” if ya didn’t kno) and started doing pixel art in Pixaki Pro on my iPad. It’s buggy af (at least for me), but I made a retro kitchen, a bunch of items, and went through several character designs until I liked one enough.

Making pixel art is really easy, especially when you use AI to generate references. (Nothing in Cake Chaos is directly AI-generated, but I definitely used it for inspo and reference images.)

Then I brought it all into Godot. Which is kinda intuitive but overwhelming. There are good tutorials on YouTube tho (link) and I’ve been figuring it out piece by piece.

Current Status

My character moves around the kitchen and can open and close cabinets and appliances when she’s standing near them. Items inside are revealed when open, and hidden when closed.

Next step is letting her pick up ingredients and use them on the counter, where contextual actions pop up (like “melt,” “chop,” or “ehh nevermind”).

I’ve been working on this for about a month and hoping to have at least one playable level ready by my birthday. August 12. I think I can do it.