My Butter Half is a two-player cooperative cooking game set in a shelter environment, where players, consisting a mother and her child, must work together to prepare meals using limited available ingredients. Inspired by pixel-style games like Stardew Valley and Overcooked, the game emphasizes teamwork, resourcefulness, and community.

Built in 24 hours for a university hackathon, youCode 2026, under the theme Innovation for Equity and Community.

Two players control a mother and child working together in a shared kitchen. Players must:

• Move around the kitchen
• Use appliances
• Follow recipe steps
• Cook and serve dishes by collaborating and communicating with each other

• W A S D — Move
• Space — Interact

• Arrow Keys — Move
• Enter — Interact

Both players can move simultaneously on the same keyboard.

• Two-player cooperative gameplay
• Pixel-style kitchen environment
• Interactive cooking appliances
• Dynamic recipe instructions
• Responsive UI that scales with screen size
• Ingredient-based recipe system
• Real-time movement and collision detection

Access to food and cooking resources can be limited in shelters and underserved communities. We wanted to build a game that reflects the importance of collaboration, adaptability, and community support when working with limited ingredients.

By creating a cooperative cooking experience, we highlight teamwork and resourcefulness in a fun and engaging way. We hope this game can relive mothers' frustration/stress with cooking for their child, and allow children to have some sort of control over what they eat, even in a shelter environment, and being involved in the cooking process by "helping" their mother (instead of in real life with kitchen appliances that might be dangerous for little children to use).

• HTML
• HTML Canvas
• CSS
• JavaScript

• Pixel art sprites
• Custom UI elements
• Responsive layout

The game uses a continuous update loop:

1. Read keyboard input
2. Update character positions
3. Check collision detection
4. Handle interactions
5. Render updated frame

• Characters use rectangular hitboxes
• Collision prevents walking through appliances
• Interaction occurs when players are close to objects

Players can interact with kitchen appliances:

• Pick up ingredients
• Use appliances
• Progress recipe steps

Interaction is triggered when the character is close enough to an object.

Using a browser, go to: https://sofiyarybchynska-web.github.io/my-butter-half/

• Implementing two-player controls on one keyboard
• Building responsive canvas-based UI
• Designing collision detection for top-down gameplay
• Creating interaction logic between characters and appliances
• Managing real-time updates smoothly

• Smooth cooperative gameplay
• Responsive pixel-style UI
• Clean modular architecture
• Meaningful theme aligned with hackathon goals
• Fully playable prototype within 24 hours

• Game loop architecture
• Canvas rendering
• Multi-player input handling
• Collision detection techniques
• Responsive UI for games

• More recipes
• Timers, cooking delays
• Animations and sound effects
• More ingredient interactions
• Implement the updating ingredients and filtering recipes features fully

• Emily Ding — UI/UX, Assets, PM, Presentation
• Amber Facher — UI/UX, Assets, PM, Presentation
• Sofiya Rybchynska — Frontend, Research and Statistics, Recipes
• Hasna Aulia — Game logic, Backend

youCode 2026 Theme: Innovation for Equity and Community

Cooking together. Supporting each other. Building community.