Added an extensive guided tutorial helping new players to learn all the basics of Chef.
Fixed a bug on the menu which prevented recipes to be placed in the correct Menu Section
Fixed a bug on the menu which misplaced recipes in wrong Menu Sections.
Menu Section in the left part of the Menu have the same order as the buttons on the right part.
Slightly improved performances.
Set a maximum amount of customer info shown in the Stat panel, to prevent performance issues while opening it.
Fixed the wrong Seats number on restaurant load.
Fixed Stats panel not opening properly on first start
Fixed tooltips drawing outside the screen.
Fixed a minor issue with beverages stats.
The game can now be pause pressing the SPACE key
Fixed a minor issue which allowed character to finish their current animation while the game was paused.
Patch 02 - Changelog
New patch available! Here's the changelog:
Ingredients Issue after the second day solved
Ingredients are no longer interactable in their UI when no Ingredient Points are available
Expanded tutorials with more information and images.
Additional tooltips in Skill Screen
Additional tooltips in Menu Screen
Additional Tooltips in Recipe Editor
Fish Soups now have proper menu sections.
Have fun! In the meantime the team will work on more updates!
Patch 01 - Changelog
The first patch for Chef is out! It solved many different things, but we are not over yet, so expect a new update in the next hours!
We also reduced the initial challenge, balancing some costs.
Changelog
Fixed the save issues with Skill Points. Old save games will be fully compatible, and all skill points spent have been restored!
Added tutorials to Chef Advisor
Added tutorials to the Ingredients Panel
Reduced and balanced the cost of all Policies
Removed a few Alerts from the tutorial phase, to avoid confusion.
Staff salaries reduced
Fixed a minor bug on a restaurant preventing some items to be placed on a single wall
Game is now fully compatible with 21:9 screens
We are not done yet, expect all major issues to be fixed very soon. Thank you for your support and patience!
Holy Lasagna! Chef has been released!
We are thrilled to announce that Chef - A Restaurant Tycoon Game has been released!
We hope you will enjoy the experience! We will be waiting for you on the Steam Forums!
New Trailer and slightly adjusted release date!
We're getting closer to the release date, meaning that we needed a new, shiny trailer! In it you won't only be able to hear the terrific voice over of Ed Kelly, it also features the massive improvements we made to the game in the last months. And since we keep working on it, it will in an even better shape for the release!
Release that we moved of a single day, the game will come out on December 6th.
Jokes aside, we only encountered a minor bureaucratic issue, but now nothing will prevent the Early Access release of Chef!
December 5th - Early Access Release Date
We finally have a release date for Chef - A Restaurant Tycoon Game. Sharpen your knifes, because Chef will be available on the 5th of December! Of the current year!
We will share more info about the game in the next days, stay tuned!
The Recipe Editor
Hello fellow Chefs and Foodies! Today we will provide some details about one feature we are quite proud of, the Recipe Editor.
Creating the Recipe Editor has been a monumental challenge. We wanted it to be realistic and still fun at the same time, not a simple task considering how complex cooking is. We therefore had to find the best compromise.
Despite the difficulty, we didn’t quit. There are more than two hundred pre-made recipes in the game and many more will be added in the future. More importantly, we wanted our players to be able to re-create their own favorite dishes, or experiment with ingredients and taste, and create new delights.
The Recipe Editor itself is not that different compared to crafting features popular in many game genres. There are some ingredients at the player’s disposal that must be assembled together into something with good stats. New or better ingredients can be unlocked during the game, and it will be very important to have the best ingredients at available, to offer to your target audience the best recipes possible.
Available ingredients can be dragged into three possible slots, used to define Main Ingredients, Important Ingredients, and Secondary Ingredients.
Main Ingredients will be the foundation of the recipe, and they will drastically affect a recipe Taste, they will also come in a higher quantity. And yes, this will affect the final price.
Important Ingredients are the ones used to give a recipe its identity, their quantity won’t be as high as the Main Ingredients, but you will still want to be careful with them. Main and Important ingredients can be used to unlock proper Tags for a Recipe.
Secondary Ingredients are meant to be used to do small tweaks to a recipe, but they won’t add any Tag to the Recipe. Having three clams in your pasta is not going to turn it into a Seafood based Recipe!
How do Tags work? Let’s say you put some Meat in your recipe, it will gain a “Meat” Tag. The game will interpret the Tags of all Recipes you will put in your menu, and this will affect possible customers. Specializing in Seafood may lure many high-paying people interested in refined cooking, but it will drive all Vegans and Vegetarians away.
But a recipe, before being targeted for a certain customer group, must be tasty, doesn’t it? Every recipe is characterized by a single Quality Score, which is generated taking several elements into consideration. The final Taste must be balanced, the Aroma of various ingredients must be compatible, and your Avatar’s skills should fit the recipe you are creating.
We tried to make sure that a good dish in game is also good in real life, but sometimes we had to make some exceptions to the rule.
Our model is 100% sure that Carbonara Pasta tastes better with some onions chopped finely in the sauce. The concept itself can spontaneously set on fire a thousand Roman innkeepers on the spot. We thought about hardcoding Carbonara Pasta for sanity’s sake, but opening a conversation about culture vs innovation can also be interesting, right? Let us know what you think about the Recipe Editor, we’re eager to hear your thoughts!
What is this game about?
This is the first of a series of posts in which I will explain all the background and the core mechanics of Chef - A Restaurant Tycoon Game.
Let’s start with what Chef is meant to be: a deep tycoon game about managing restaurants and providing food to a variety of customers, always ready to destroy your reputation with bad reviews. (sounds a little like doing videogames, doesn’t it?) We focused on creating a sandbox experience allowing anyone to create their own unique style of cooking without constraints, and we built several mechanics capable of interpreting the player’s choices and to create realistic outcomes related to them.
The first step in the game will be the Character Creation. We felt that creating a proper Avatar could be way better than just hiring random cooks. During Character Creation it will be possible to customize the Avatar’s appearance and choose several initial skills. Fear not, nothing will prevent you to radically change your specialization, or to try becoming a master in any field. But you will have to earn it!
When starting a new game, you will be unable to buy a restaurant, so you will need to rent one and you will be able to choose among several options. Is it better to have a bigger place in the countryside or a small one in the city? Location will matter and affect the number and type of customers you will attract.
Once you choose where to start, you need to properly set up the place before opening it. We created hundreds of different customizations for the restaurant and you will be able to change all walls and floors, and also place several furnishing items across the restaurant increasing its aesthetical appeal and ambience rating. Don’t forget about cooking equipment! More equipment means that more dishes can be prepared at the same time. But remember the more equipment the higher the maintenance costs, we can’t have free electricity. Not even in videogames!
Hiring the staff will be very important. We wanted a realistic approach to the matter, so most people available for hire will be unprofessional, lazy, and unqualified. Finding good people for your staff will be hard, you better keep them happy once you find them!
The last step is preparing a proper menu. You will be able to fill it with both pre-made and player-made recipes, but price and cooking time are not the only things that matter! Put some vegan recipes in your menu and your restaurant will suddenly unlock the Perk “Vegan Friendly”, meaning that Vegan customers will stop ignoring the place! This system works using special Tags that characterize both Recipes and Ingredients.
So, adding random Dishes to your Menu won’t really work. You must be strategic in selecting the items for your menu. Menus will have to be carefully assembled and consider the cost of the ingredients, the lowest possible cooking times, recipes compatible with your skill set, but yet have the proper product to attract your targeted category of customers! Finding the most lucrative balance won’t be easy!
At last, the Recipe Editor! We wanted to create something realistic and fun to play at the same time. After some failed attempts, we finally made it! Creating recipes will be a delicate work of balancing the taste of the various ingredients and placing as many aromatic matches as possible, while keeping the costs as low as possible and managing to get the classification you want for the Recipe.
That’s all for now! In the next weeks I will share more info about all different gameplay mechanics. For now, the whole team is eager to hear your feedback!
