We put a 3D sushi game in the arcade

It has been a quiet few weeks on the blog but not on the arcade. I kept meaning to write this up and kept getting pulled back into the thing I actually want to talk about, which is a new game. So here it is, a bit late, on a slow afternoon.

The big one is Katana kitchen, and it is the first proper 3D game we have made. Everything in the arcade so far has been flat, pixel art, canvas stuff. This one is real 3D with actual models flying around, and getting there was more of a fight than I expected.

Katana kitchen

If you have ever played Fruit Ninja you already get it. Ingredients get tossed up in front of you, you swipe to slice them, and you try not to let any drop. The twist is that it is sushi. You are stood behind the board in first person, knife ready, and salmon, tuna, squid, avocado and sea urchin come flying up. Slice one cleanly and it turns into a finished piece of nigiri that pops off the screen. Sea urchin is the rare one and worth a lot more, so when an uni shows up you really do not want to miss it.

Slicing several in one swipe builds a combo, and the longer the chain the more each cut is worth, so the satisfying play is to wait half a second for three or four things to line up and take them all in one stroke. There are wasabi bombs mixed in, the angry green ones, and hitting one costs you points and a life and resets your combo. You get three lives. Let an edible ingredient fall past the board and that is a life gone too, so you cannot just stand there waiting around for a clean swipe forever.

I will be honest, 3D in the browser was fiddly. It is built in Three.js with proper models for every ingredient and the finished sushi, in a little Japanese kitchen. Getting the slice to feel right was the hard part, because the swipe happens in 2D on your screen and the ingredients live in 3D space, so the game has to project each one back to where it actually is on screen and check if your line crossed it. It took way longer than it should have to get that to feel fair instead of either missing obvious cuts or slicing things you never touched. There is also a whole bit where the first tosses wait until every model has loaded, so you never get a grey placeholder block flying at you. Small thing, annoying to get right.

The daily puzzles got a lot deeper

The other thing I spent time on is less flashy but probably matters more day to day. A bunch of the daily games were running out of fresh puzzles too fast, so if you played every day you would start seeing repeats. I went through the pools for things like Word ladder, Mini crossword and Spelling bee and made them a lot bigger, enough that you should get at least a month of new puzzles before anything comes back around.

While I was in there I noticed a few games were secretly daily, one fresh puzzle a day, but never said so anywhere. Those now show the daily tag on the arcade overview like they always should have, so you can actually tell what resets each day and what you can just keep playing.

A few small fixes

Nothing dramatic, just stuff that was bugging me. Solitaire now highlights the whole stack you are dragging instead of just the top card, and I fixed the order the stock recycles in so it matches the classic Klondike you remember. Math sprint got a proper makeover and looks like an actual calculator now, and it flashes ERROR at you when you fumble an answer instead of doing nothing. And the Aim trainer targets now scale with your window, so the difficulty stays the same whether you are on a laptop or a big monitor. They used to feel easier on a bigger screen, which was a little silly for a trainer.

That is the lot for now. Katana kitchen is the one to try first, it is the most fun thing we have put in the arcade in a while. As always it is free, no sign up, runs in your browser. If the slicing feels off on your setup let me know and I will keep tuning it.