Building a Playable Cartoon: Lessons From Food Festival 3

Hi everyone! We’re TATO MAMO, a small studio making story-driven, family-friendly mobile games. When we started developing Food Festival 3, we wanted to combine the feeling of watching a cartoon with the interactivity of a cooking simulator. We called this vision a playable cartoon — something between a kids cooking game, an animated show, and a tactile cooking game for kids.

It sounded simple at first: just make a burger maker game feel like a cartoon. But the deeper we got, the more we realized how many design and technical details stood behind that phrase. Here’s what we learned while creating one of the most joyful burger cooking games for kids.

1. Consistency Is Everything

One of the first challenges was making the experience seamless. Cartoons usually flow smoothly, with consistent timing and visual transitions. Traditional cooking games, burger chef games, or restaurant games often interrupt the flow with hard cuts, loading screens, or pop-ups.

To build that cartoon-like rhythm in our kitchen game, we added short in-between animations — or “micro-cuts” — between actions like slicing, frying, or plating. It made our burger cooking simulator feel more like a living world and less like a mechanical cooking time loop.

2. Expressive Characters Drive Engagement

In a cartoon, characters carry the emotion. So in our burger builder gameplay, we made characters react: a burger patty hops when it’s flipped, a chef raises an eyebrow if the lettuce falls off. These tiny moments make the experience more engaging — especially for kids.

Children cooking games need this emotional texture. It increases replayability, reinforces kitchen skills, and even supports food education through fun.

3. Slow Play Beats Adrenaline

Many popular cooking games — like Cooking Madness, Cooking Fever, or Cooking Dash — focus on speed. But cartoons aren’t about racing. They’re cozy. So we stripped away timers and fail-states. Instead, our burger game became a relaxing, free cooking game that encourages experimentation.

This approach made Food Festival 3 feel like cooking for kids, not just a race to complete orders. It worked especially well with toddler games, preschool apps, and educational games for kids aged 3–6.

4. Animation Pipelines Matter

A playable cartoon only works if animations are solid — even in a kids burger maker or burger factory game. We built a pipeline that let our artists test rigs and iterate quickly, layering expressions, transitions, and cooking actions like slicing onions or flipping a gourmet burger.

5. Keep It Honest

We’re a small team. We can’t match Pixar, but we can create a playful, readable style that works for kids games, simulation games, and culinary games on mobile. So we chose a bold palette, expressive faces, and readable icons to guide younger players through cooking adventures.

Being honest about scope also helped us focus: we picked gameplay that made the most of our animation — like stacking a double burger, assembling a veggie burger, or playing a bacon burger game with drag-and-drop ingredients.

What’s Next
We’re still exploring where the playable cartoon idea can go — new recipes, new mini-games, new genres. Whether it’s a burger flip game, a pizza game, or a food truck game, we believe the best kids cooking games are about joy, not stress.