Dungeon Chef
Dungeon Chef is a roguelike cooking game inspired by slot machines. You play a traveling monster chef who cooks by spinning three ingredient reels, then serves the dish to satisfy each room's hungry customer before they run out of patience and attack. Built to fuse the push-your-luck tension of a slot machine with the build-crafting of a deckbuilding roguelike - ingredients, special orders, combos, and a tiered upgrade tree make every run play differently. Built solo in Python and Pygame, with every visual drawn entirely from primitive shapes.
Gameplay
Systems Programming
I architected the whole game as a lightweight state machine spanning the menu, tutorial, combat, map, shop, rest, mystery, reward, pause, and game-over screens - all sharing one resolution-independent 1200x800 canvas with mouse-coordinate scaling so the window stays fully resizable. The core loop is a cook, reroll, and serve flow built on an animated three-reel slot system, layered with special orders, pair and triple combos, and per-monster ingredient preferences that re-weight effects each encounter. A tiered upgrade economy spanning Common, Rare, and Powerful tiers grows the player's build across rooms, difficulty scales per room with a boss every fifth, and a run-tracking layer persists best-room and run stats between attempts.
Design & Balance
I designed the ingredient set, upgrade pools, monster roster, and room types to reward experimentation while keeping each run readable. Risk and reward is baked into the map - elites and mystery events trade danger for bigger payoffs, while shops and rest rooms offer safer recovery - and I tuned satisfaction targets, patience, anger, and gold costs so a loss feels like a lesson rather than a wall. I iterated heavily on game feel through clear post-serve feedback, color-coded effects, and a Bonus Effects panel with a scrollable full-upgrade overlay so players can always read their current build at a glance.
UI & Visual Style
Because the brief required no external assets, I built the entire look from Pygame primitives. Every ingredient and room icon, the slot cabinet, cooking pot, wall torches, panels, and buttons are composed from circles, polygons, and rectangles. I ran the visuals through several passes - from a deliberately flat early skin to a polished dungeon-kitchen theme with a brick background, warm palette, drop shadows, hover states, and ambient details including torch flicker and a bubbling pot - while keeping the icons clean and readable even at small sizes.