Cooks to Go

About Cooks to Go

Cooks to Go is a Filipino street-cart survival simulation by Fylows and the Team “Skibidi
Society”, made for the Los Baños Game Jam 2026. The pitch is blunt: by day, you have two
minutes to sell everything you can to keep yourself — and your family — afloat. When night
falls, your only lifeline is your phone: restock, upgrade your cart, buy medicine, pay rent,
cover the bills, or maybe even gamble all your money away. The choice is yours, but every
peso spent is a peso you do not have somewhere else. “Cooking was never the hardest part.”

The game is structured as a day/night survival loop with a life-simulation flavor. The day
side is a fast selling minigame with a hard two-minute clock; the night side is a phone menu
of competing demands. The tension between them is the whole game: the day decides how much
you have, and the night decides how much of it survives contact with reality.

The same team also made Pabili Justisya (Los Baños Game Jam 2025), and the two games share a
family of concerns — running a small Filipino food business and the pressure of making ends
meet.

How to Play

The game runs on a two-phase loop:

1. Start a day. From the main menu press Play, choose a vendor name for your stall (the
   default is “Web User”), and the day begins.
2. Sell within two minutes. Customers arrive, you sell as much as you can, and the clock
   is the boss. Speed and accuracy on the cart determine your income for the day.
3. Go to your phone at night. The night menu is where all money decisions live: restock
   supplies, upgrade your cart, buy medicine, pay rent, cover bills — each option competes
   for the same pesos.
4. Survive the cycle. Money earned by day is spent or saved by night; the run continues
   as long as you can keep the family afloat.

The MUSIC and SFX toggles live on the start screen, and the Gallery section tracks unlockable
content (15 items locked at first launch).

The Day/Night Squeeze

The design insight in Cooks to Go is that the selling is not the hard part — the allocation
is. The two-minute day is a contained, exciting burst, but the real decisions happen at
night, where there is never enough money for everything. Restock now and you might starve at
the end of the week; pay rent and you might not have stock for tomorrow; gamble and you might
fix everything or lose it.

That “every peso spent is a peso you don’t have somewhere else” framing makes the game a
survival sim about priorities rather than reflexes. It is a short, honest look at what
running a street cart at the bottom of the economy actually means, wrapped in a friendly
pixel-art package.

Tips for New Players

• Maximize the day first. The night menu is only as good as the money you bring in, so
  treat the two-minute selling window as the primary income source.
• Restock before you upgrade. An empty cart sells nothing; keeping stock on hand protects
  your next day’s income.
• Pay rent and bills first. Missed obligations tend to cascade, so cover the fixed costs
  before spending on optional upgrades.
• Watch the gamble. The page openly offers gambling as an option — it is a high-risk
  shortcut, not a strategy.
• Use the settings. MUSIC and SFX can be toggled on the start screen if you want a quieter
  run.

The Setting

The street cart is the smallest unit of Filipino food entrepreneurship — a two-minute window
of selling, a family depending on it, and a phone full of bills at night. Cooks to Go turns
that reality into a tight game loop, and the Los Baños Game Jam 2026 framing (“cooking was
never the hardest part”) keeps the tone wry rather than grim. It is a short, playable slice
of the everyday Filipino hustle.