Tiny Questers - Cook To Zero

🍳 Tiny Questers: Cook to Zero

Your kitchen is the barracks. Cook fast, or the castle falls.

You are the cook and the commander. Prep ingredients, pull them off the pan at the right moment, plate them up — and every finished dish marches out as a soldier. Burn the food and all you've made is a trip to the trash can.

🎮 Made for GMTK Game Jam 2026 — a single-lane auto-battler crossed with a timing-based cooking puzzle. Mouse only — play right here in your browser, or grab the Windows build.

📱 Desktop only — mobile is not supported. The game needs a mouse and a desktop browser. Phones and tablets won't run it properly.

🔥 How to Play

• 1. Buy — ingredients cost gold. You can't cook what you didn't stock.
• 2. Prep — drag ingredients onto the cutting board, then the frying pan. Bread and eggs skip the board.
• 3. Time it — pull food off the pan after it's cooked but before it burns. The gauge is your only warning.
• 4. Plate — two cooked ingredients on the plate complete a dish.
• 5. Serve — drop the dish on the unit that ordered it and it joins the lane.
• 6. Push — survive the stage and bring the enemy castle down.

⏱️ Undercooked food won't plate. Burnt food is gone — straight to the bin, gold and all. The whole game lives in that half-second window.

⚔️ The Menu

🗡️ Warrior — Bread + Egg

Pan only, no chopping. Your fastest summon and your front line. When the wave is already on top of you, this is the order you can actually finish in time.

🏹 Archer — Meat + Potato

Board, then pan. Twice the prep, but it fires from behind the warriors and never trades hits.

🔮 Mage — Mushroom + Tomato

Board, then pan. Trades single-target damage for splash — one bolt hits every enemy in the blast. Weak against a lone golem, brutal against a packed wave.

💰 Between the Cooking

Gold ticks in on a timer and drops from every enemy your line kills. Three things to spend it on, and never enough for all three:

• 🥩 Ingredients — the raw material for every summon
• 📈 Unit upgrades — permanent HP and attack, per class
• ⏳ Income — shortens the gold timer, and compounds for the rest of the run

Hover any unit card to see exactly what the next upgrade buys you before you commit.

🏰 Ten Stages

Each stage runs longer and heavier than the last — slimes and skeletons give way to orcs, and orcs give way to golems. Clear one with time to spare and the leftover seconds pay out as a fast-clear bonus.

🔄 Retry rolls you back. Restart a stage and your gold and upgrades return to exactly what they were when the stage began — no farming the same wave for a stockpile.

🖱️ Controls

Mouse only. Drag and drop everything — ingredients, dishes, the lot.

🌐 Play in Browser

No install needed — run it right here on this page. Hit the fullscreen button for the best view. One heads-up: click the game once before you expect sound, that's a browser policy thing.

Want steadier framerate? Grab the Windows download instead.

🛠️ Tech

Unity 2D — 320 × 180 pixel perfect (PPU 16) — Browser (WebGL) · Windows (64-bit).

🎨 Credits

This game is not the product of generative AI. Every part of it was hand-made or properly sourced below.

• 💻 Programming · design · game design — hand-made by bobddadoo
• 🖌️ Pixel art — drawn by hand, except the third-party assets listed below
• 🎵 Music — purchased from Melody Loops
• 🔊 Sound effects — free SFX from Pixabay

Third-party pixel art:

• 🗑️ Trash can — Free Pixel Art Trash Pack (Animated) by karsiori
• 🕐 Clock — Clock Pixel Art by bontt

AI usage: generative AI was used only to translate the in-game text into English. No AI touched the art, audio, code, or design.

🧙 More from Tiny Questers

The pixel art in this game comes from my own Tiny Questers asset line — same 64×64 body, same pivot, same animation workflow.