This week I've started to compile the ideas I have for my personal project into a coherent plan, and I decided to focus on my favourite video game franchise of the past few years, the Legend of Zelda. Picking Tears of the Kingdom for reference, I want to add sense and reason to the cooking system, and parse good ingredients from bad ingredients. I would like to analyse the recipe system according to a few different requirements, among them heart/stamina restoration, cost, effort to source ingredients and the price mark-up compared to raw ingredients.
I plan to webscrape websites detailing these categories of information, for example here: https://www.zeldadungeon.net/wiki/Breath_of_the_Wild_Recipes
and here: https://game8.co/games/Zelda-Tears-of-the-Kingdom/archives/411134
As of yet I am not sure how much data prep will be needed, but I am expecting a lot of cleaning will need to be completed! I will probably also require a multitude of tables that will hopefully be eventually join together without error. I have a couple of chart ideas in mind I'll detail here:
The first is a slope graph analysing the difference in selling price of ingredients before and after cooking them together to identify the recipes that have the greatest mark-up if one is to be a shrewd gastronomer in the world of Hyrule. This would involve fixed LODs adding up the prices of each ingredient and comparing to the price of the finished recipe.
Another chart I would like to design is a chart of the number of recipes of certain types to see if Hyrule has a bias towards certain cuisine, whether it's for 'hearty' food, 'prime' food or even something as specific as 'glazed' food, and analysing whether those foods are the most economical to sustain and heal oneself, or whether Hyrule has a bias towards inefficient food. I would also like to look into meals that are 'cheap and easy' (cheap ingredients, few ingredients in the recipe) and meals that are a bit more indulgent. In essence I would like the project to identify trends or insights into Hylian food culture.
Possible outcomes of this project I am anticipating would be to get more practice in web-scraping and cleaning in a prep tool of my choice (I'm currently leaning towards Alteryx) as well as practice with number and string manipulation that may prove essential in gathering insights. I am excited to delve into this project and cannot wait to post about further outcomes or findings in due course.