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”! Hardly a serious problem, but a daily one, and somehow never easy to answer. 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 a name out of a static list would have been a much lighter build (I could do that in Slack or a Google Sheet), and it wouldn’t need to be a website at all. For this to be worth making, the recommendation had to be personal, 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 rather than gesturing at them.
WHAT WAS HARD
Two forces pull against each other. Push for variety and you start getting suggestions that are too strange, or plainly wrong for a work lunch. Pull back toward safe and it recommends the same five things every day. Finding the perfect balance where it stays surprising but still sensible took a lot of iteration.