SUPER JEOMMECHU TURBO
The greatest dilemma of your life (what to eat for lunch), settled by a retro arcade game.
JEOMMECHU.COM↗WHY I BUILT IT
Every day at work, my team had the same question: what should we eat? “Jeommechu” is Korean internet slang for “lunch menu recommendation”! I was less interested in solving it than in making it fun, so it became a retro arcade game with a team mode where you pick together. The whole thing took a day.
WHAT I WOULDN’T COMPROMISE ON
Pulling an item from a static list would have been a lighter build (I could do that in Slack or a Google Sheet). But for this to be worth making, the recommendation had to be customized, so it factors in the weather and the day of the week.
This started as a workplace problem, so it had to be something a group does together, not one person getting an answer alone and the whole thing ending there.
Those are the two design ideas, and I committed to both fully, including very minor details.
WHAT WAS HARD
Push for variety and you start getting lunch recommendations that are too strange or just wrong for a work lunch. Pull toward safe and it recommends the same things every day. Finding the perfect balance took a lot of iteration.