The success of Overcooked makes me think about what makes a game “addictive”

“Throw me the tomato!”

“No, no, not the potato, I want tomato... Could you also cook rice?”

“Oh, no… we need to wash the plates…”

Looks familiar right? It is what will happen if you play Overcooked with your friends and it is normal. It’s okay if you do not know what is Overcooked because you will know what is just in seconds.

In 2016, Overcooked, a highly-addictive co-op game comes to the game market and brings lots of fun to us. It is a local multiplayer restaurant game where players need to act as chefs in the kitchen to work with other players in order to prepare meals and deliver orders in a high-pressure time limit. However, it is not only about preparing meals by following top left cooking recipes but more about how to deal with the chaos and ridiculousness happening in the kitchen. So, it was just the simplest recipe, maybe fires and nuggets which is potato and chicken, yet still it was so hard to get everything right and deliver meals for customers on time.

Design a game is not that hard. But making the game “addictive” and fun is definitely difficult. I was so addicted into this game during the break and I played this game with my friends for a long time in order to hit three stars for the rounds we played. It makes me wonder why this game is so addictive and successful?

To take a closer look at the game, there are several factors make the game addictive and successful:

Multiplayer & co-operative cooking experience

The first thing that comes to my mind it the word “co-po”. Without help from one other player, one player can hardly level up and keep everything in order by dealing with messy issues happened in the kitchen. Like lots of articles about this game, the starting point for Overcooked always comes back to the co-operative cooking experience. The elements and challenges throughout the game are designed to encourage collaboration and teamwork. No matter what elements are added, they need to serve the purpose of creating a co-operative cooking experience. As the level goes up, more ingredients needed and more cooking and preparing steps needed for people to divide the work and negotiate. Also, the game is accessible for a great number of users and the situation where one experienced player can carry the whole team win the game hardly happens. It is the charming part of the game and brings laugh and fun for the group of people.

Most interestingly, while teamwork and cooperation could make the game become easier, it was often anything but.

Multiple touchpoints of interactions within the game

Going off the co-operative cooking experience, Overcooked is not just a restaurant game that players only care about how to make the specific recipe. The game is trying to balance between making meals and dealing with other issues in the kitchen. Besides following the recipe to make food, there are multiple engaging touchpoints and interactions designed and developed within the game, such as the game is well designed by keeping “balance” in mind. According to an article from Wired, “When we were developing the first Overcooked, the bulk of the development time was actually spent on balancing the process of preparing a recipe,” he says. “Gradually, we added more and more touches so that the stress of the game came much more from the levels themselves and player interactions with one another than they did from the minutiae of preparing a complex recipe.”

For example, the stage might transfer the players into a different place where they will be blocked by the table and wall, players need to take care the boiling water to get rid of fire in the kitchen, players also need to pass the plates and wash the plat separately to make sure they are able to deliver the food and sometimes the ingredient will be throwback and forth to successfully prepare the meals.

In the article published on the Wired, Gavin Hood, Team17 lead designer, said: “A lot of the time, the things that made players laugh and cry wasn’t having difficult-to-understand and prepare recipes. It was those moments in stages where everything changes; that point at which the kitchen you’re cooking in starts to work against you.”

Unpredictable experience & Level up gameplay

The campaign provides players with different challenges that truly create an unpredictable experience within the game. Each area on the campaign consists of different levels and each level has varied difficulties and complexity. It is the variety of locations, kitchen layouts, and the messy issues that fresh out players’ improvisation and then elevates the experience of Overcooked. When players just get used to the map and the kitchen layout, they will realize new challenges just show up and wait for them to adapt again. The level up mechanic asks players to pass the game with at least one star in order to unlock the new level. But that is not all of the cases. Getting one star for each level is fairly easy. That’s why players need to earn more stars to unlocked higher levels later in the game.

Verbal communication

My own playing experience tells me that one of the reasons that make Overcooked success is definitely verbal communication happens between my friend and I. It is definitely part of co-operative experience but I do want to emphasize it separately here. It is so funny when you hear your friend yell and scream, “Oh, I’m sorry! I lost my mind. I threw the food in the wrong direction!” That is the charming part of local multiplayer mode which allows face-to-face communication and brings lots of fun.

To extending the factors that make the game “addictive” in Overcooked, we, as game designers, should be able to actively gather the spice that can be added on in the game to make it fun and engaging. Then, when players login and pick up the controller, they don’t want to leave. Besides some unique gaming experiences I mentioned previously, we might want to summarize some overall factors that should be considered in the game design process.

Social factors — beating the rival & building the relationship

By competing with friends or people in the online community, players can feel a sense of satisfaction and be motivated to beat the rival. Keep playing the game can help the players rise up on the leaderboard and more equipment or game skins will also be unlocked.

Also, the online gaming community and online role-playing games allow players to build close relationships with others, for example, they can form a team to play the game or chat about the setting and new updates of games.

Level up game mechanics — beating the game

Just like Overcooked, the level up mechanics creates a sense of uncertainty and unpredictable environments which attract players to explore and engage in the game to reveal the game story. “Levels up” can definitely trigger the desire of players to beat the game.

Role-playing games

For the people who do not really know what is a role-playing game, a role-playing game is a game in which players will assume the roles of characters in the game — a fictional setting. players will act out the actions of those characters and they will decide what the characters will do next and take responsibility. Role-playing games allow players to do more than just play. Players will create their own characters in the game world and then an emotional attachment to the character will be developed and make the player become more addicted into this game. It creates a sense of belonging.

To think about the factors that make a game addictive when you design the game, you might find that is actually not that hard to incorporate them with your design. ^_^