ProjectProposal-JamesYeh
From CS 160 Fall 2008
Contents |
Individual Project Proposal: Cooking Simulation
Target User Group
The target user group is anybody who enjoys cooking and is also health-conscious about his or her food choices. This could include people who cook their food daily and hope to maintain a balanced diet, or those who wish to lose weight and plan to create their own meals.
The main concern of both these categories of people will be the overall nutritional value of their daily meals. For those who only wish to pursue a balanced diet, their goal will be to take in the recommended daily values of calories, fat, sodium, etc. For those who wish to lose weight, they would use the recommended daily values are a baseline standard and eat a little less of calories, fat, and carbohydrates. Either way, the consumers will be setting their own nutritional goals and want to know if they are reaching these goals through the food they are cooking. Furthermore, since the target audience will be cooking often, they will have to buy groceries that are sufficient but also fit into their budget.
Problem Description
With the steadily increasing rate of obesity today (especially in the younger age groups), practicing a healthy diet has become a major issue for many people. Nutritional experts have not only advised against eating at fast food restaurants (due to their obvious lack of healthy options), but also discouraged going out to eat, due to the deceivingly high calorie and fat content of many restaurants’ dishes. As a result, cooking one’s own meals has become a healthy alternative, because it gives people the freedom to plan out and decide on exactly what they eat, and allows them to fully determine the content of their meals. However, oftentimes even people who cook regularly don’t know the nutritional values of what they are putting into their food; this could become a problem for those who wish to maintain a strict diet regimen. If there was a way for people to keep track of the nutritional content of each meal, and total up the values of all meals for a day, the difficulty of tallying and balancing dietary needs would be mostly eliminated.
Problem Context and Forces
Losing weight has long been known to be something that is easier said than done. Many people struggle with fad diets and products that promise quick weight loss, only to give up in the end. Advertisers further entice overweight consumers looking for an easy solution by offering supplements (most likely gimmicks) that “really work”, when in reality weight loss is a process that takes time, patience, and effort. With fast food becoming increasingly accessible and people becoming increasingly busy, it has become harder and harder for people to either stay healthy or lose weight.
One of the most important factors to staying healthy is maintaining a proper balanced diet. However, many people fail to do this because they are poorly informed about the nutritional value of what they are eating. Even though many food products have a nutritional facts table on the outside of their packaging, consumers often do not read it—and even if they do read it, that piece of food is very likely only one item of the many things they will be eating throughout the day. Because of this, it is very hard for people tally their total daily intake of calories, fat, sodium, carbs, etc., such that they could actually keep track of whether or not they are meeting their nutrient goals.
Cooking is an option that allows one to control what he/she eats; but again, it is hard to determine the overall nutritional value of each meal. People rarely have the discipline or desire to write down and add up the nutritional characteristics of every single ingredient they use in making a dish—such a procedure would be tedious and time-wasting. Cooking is mainly done so people can enjoy what they make, not so they could count their food to every last calorie or gram of fat. As a result, consumers want to keep track of the nutritional content of their food in a way that is non-intrusive and not too time-consuming, so that they can be happy with what they are eating and still be able to savor their cooking creations.
Solution Sketch
A possible solution for the problem described above is a cooking game (simulation) in which the player would virtually cook dishes that they would be likely to cook in real life. More specifically, the game would allow players to cook a meal in the same process as they normally would in reality, i.e. mixing small ingredients such as salt, vinegar, corn starch, etc. The main feature of this game is that as the player is adding or mixing in each ingredient, the player display will increment the nutritional content values accordingly of the meal being made. In effect, once the player has finished adding all the ingredients for a dish and cooked all the dishes for a meal, the game will display the total nutritional value for that meal. In addition, each day will be a separate page (or save file) in the game, such that if the player wishes to cook two or three meals a day, the total nutritional intake for the day will be shown.
Key characteristics of this game include:
- The freedom to choose between any combination or proportion of ingredients (for example, the player could choose to add 10 tablespoons of sugar to his coffee if he likes). Thus, the player is not limited to the amounts of a particular ingredient listed on a recipe, and is free to experiment with his own creations.
- A built-in recipe database. There will already be a variety of recipes (including appetizers, entrees, desserts) implemented into the game; however, the player is also able to create and store new recipe tabs and save them into the recipe database. Furthermore, these recipes only serve as guidelines, as a player is never obligated to follow a recipe when making a dish.
- A dish rating system. Each dish will be assigned two ratings: one for health value, and one for taste. There will be default ratings for each recipe; however, the rating system is mainly user-determined, as the player is free to change and save the taste rating of a dish after trying that a dish in real life. Ratings for each dish are saved for future reference, as a player might revert to past dishes that they want to cook again.
In addition, there could be a “career mode” option in which the player would continue the virtual cooking simulation for 30 (or more) days. Additional features would include a grocery shopping simulation, in which the player sets a budget and goes down each aisle, selecting a combination of items that will fit into the budget. Furthermore, in career mode the player would be able to enter his weight at the end of each week, so that he can compare his weight progress with the total calories eaten each week.
