⚠ Development build

This is an early playtest build. All art and audio are placeholders. Expect rough edges, missing polish, and the occasional bug. The game is in active development; the page will be updated as things land.

About

Counter Rush is a real-time cooking game built around a simple idea: every customer's order is a list of flavor and texture tags, and your job is to build a dish that hits as many of those tags as possible before they run out of patience.

It's cozy in tone but real-time in pressure: the counter doesn't pause, ovens and freezers burn what they're holding if you forget about them, and patience keeps ticking even while you're standing at the fridge trying to decide.

How to Play

The goal: serve customers desserts that match the tags on their order ticket. More tags matched = more pay. 

The service loop:

A customer arrives at the counter with an order ticket showing a list of tags (for example: sweet, creamy, fruity).

Walk to a dispenser (shelf, fridge) and pick up an ingredient. You can only carry one thing at a time.

Drop the ingredient onto a station. Repeat until the station has the ingredients a recipe needs — you can start with simple dough in a mixer (flour, sugar, butter).

The station starts cooking and a bar fills up. When it's full, the station is ready — pick the dish up.

If you don't pick it up in time, dishes on a timed station (oven, freezer) go burnt. Burnt items can't be sold — carry them to the Trash bin. The customer leaves unhappy.

Carry the finished dish to the delivery station and drop it on the matching order to hand it to the customer. They pay based on how many of their tags your dish matched.

Day 0 — set up the shop. The game opens in build mode with an empty bakery shell and a starter set of stations and dispensers. Place them on the grid (R to rotate), then hit Start Day to open. The first two days only roll orders you can satisfy with a basic cookie, so you have room to learn the loop before the menu opens up.

Between days — the shop phase. When a service day ends, you spend the money you earned on more stations, dispensers, counters, and decor, and rearrange the floor. The next day starts when you choose to open the shop again. 

Note: this build does not save progression between full sessions yet.

Tips for testers:

Tags are forgiving: extra tags on your dish are free, and missing tags only lower the pay — they don't reject the order.

The customer's patience is your real timer. The station's cooking bar is the second timer.

A station with the wrong ingredient set will fizzle instead of cooking.

Stations behave differently — mixers and pour stations run themselves and won't burn, ovens and freezers burn if you ignore them, and chopping/kneading needs you holding the interact key.

Ingredient tags are visible in the world — pick something up to see what can be done with it.

Press I anytime during a day to see your full ingredient inventory; press K to open the recipe book.

What's in this build

A short service day with a small set of recipes (cookie, brownie, sponge cake, ice cream, chocolate ice cream, strawberry tart, and the intermediates that feed them).

Six station types (mix, bake, chop, knead, pour, freeze) with three distinct behaviors: passive (mixer, pour), hold-to-progress (chop, knead), and timed-with-burn (oven, freezer).

A grid-based build mode for placing and rearranging stations, counters, dispensers, and decor on the bakery floor.

A guided first-cookie tutorial for new players (toggle off in Settings if you'd rather explore on your own).

A shop phase between days for spending earnings on new gear.

A burn pile for disposing of failed dishes.

A fixed PlateUp-style camera by default, with an optional freelook camera in Settings.

HUD carry panel with item icons and tag chips so you always know what's in your hands.

Pause menu, settings, rebindable controls.

What we want feedback on

The playtest is trying to answer four specific questions. If your feedback can speak to any of these, it's gold:

Loop feel. Does the service loop hold your attention for a full ~10-minute session, or does it sag?

Tag readability. Can you read a customer's tags, look at your ingredients, and decide what to make — without stopping to think for too long?

Pressure balance. Does the patience timer + cooking timer feel fair, or does it feel punishing or trivial?

Discoverability. How easy is it to discover new recipes from the ingredient tags?

Controls

Action                          Key

Move                            WASD

Run                             Shift

Rotate camera                   Q / E

Zoom camera                     Mouse wheel

Orbit camera                    Right Mouse drag

Reset camera                    Home

Interact / pick up / drop       F

Cancel / drop ghost in build    X

Rotate furniture in build       R

Inventory                       I

Recipe book                     K

Skip tutorial step              T

Pause                           Esc

All keys can be rebound from Settings.