Hey everyone! I'm excited to announce our big update for Cook Serve Forever will be available on December 12th!
I want to make sure it's as polished as it can be so I'm taking a little extra time before getting it out of the oven. With this update you'll find a completely redesigned gameplay experience, which I outlined in this blog post earlier last month!
I hope everyone has a good holiday break in the states and I'm eager to see what everyone thinks of the big new update next month! Take care y'all!
-David
Steam Cooking Fest Serves Up TONS of CSD Discounts!
Hey everyone! I'm so excited that Cook, Serve, Delicious! is part of the Steam Cooking Fest, available now thru November 18th!
A huge new gameplay overhaul is coming to Cook Serve Forever later this month- you can grab it on discount now and be ready for the all new gameplay systems when it drops soon! For more information on all of the new gameplay features be sure to check out our big news update.
I can't wait to share more news on the future of the CSD series next year, including the Re-Mustard remake that celebrates the entire series as a whole with tons of fun and exciting surprises. Woo!
From everyone on the CSD team, thanks so much for all of your support through the years, and here's to another round of delish games!
-David Galindo Creator of the Cook Serve Delicious series Also on BlueSky!!
CSF Gameplay OVERHAUL Preview!
Hi everyone! My name is David Galindo and I’m the creator of the Cook, Serve, Delicious! series as well as the director on Cook Serve Forever. You can find me over on Bluesky these days, so feel free to follow me there for updates on CSF and Cook, Serve, Delicious: Re-Mustard!
When we first launched Cook Serve Forever it was my first time overseeing a large project without programming any part of it (we attempted a small experimental project, ChefSquad, that was a fun Twitch only game). I was wearing a ton of hats all at once, overseeing all the production pipelines, and as a result the gameplay didn’t get the attention that I normally give the CSD titles. As a result the game opened to mixed reviews.
This was not acceptable to me. I had a lot of time to reflect on what I wanted my life to be- what direction I want to take my career, how involved I want to be, or if I just wanted to handle the managerial aspects forever. And that sounded truly terrible.
And so, I decided to make the decision to throw away the entire codebase of Cook Serve Forever and start from scratch, going back to being the sole programmer I was in Cook, Serve, Delicious! 1 and 2. And let me tell you- it has been a blast getting back to programming. Being able to focus on the gameplay design and make huge strides in days that were taking us weeks previously was such a huge motivational push to keep going, as there were certainly days that I felt like I wasn’t sure it was all going to come together.
A little over one year later, I’m excited to reveal the new gameplay dynamics of Cook Serve Forever, with the first update coming next month in November!
Keeping the Dynamics
When I first started re-designing the game, I had no idea what direction to take the game. Since we were starting over, should I make it more like CSD? Or maybe a rhythm game? A strategy game? Ultimately, I realized that the core fundamentals of the game- a chill, relaxed cooking game that perhaps had a larger ceiling to get more difficult as the game progresses through the story- was the right one to pursue.
CSF is a very different type of cooking game- you’re cooking one dish at a time, utilizing button prompts for each type of cooking action you want to do. Chopping will take sixteen hits of L1, while Stirring will have you holding down R1 while tapping the face buttons in a circular motion. What’s unique about this game- the one key element that sets it apart from the original EA release and other cooking games- is that CSF allows you to do both preps at once. Utilizing a split gamepad or keyboard control layout, you can chop onions on the left side of the gamepad/keyboard while grilling with the right side. While you’re holding down a patty with A you can grate cheese with L2. It’s very much like playing a piano, and as you get more familiar with all 15+ prep functions you’ll get faster and faster, clearing goals and earning holographic stickers for each level.
Here’s a first look at the gameplay in action to give you a better idea of how this works:
Progression
I have found that the gameplay is a lot more challenging and fun to play- getting better and better at levels opens up the opportunity to have a new goal based system where you have to earn a certain amount of Good and Perfect orders to win the holo sticker, or just one of the goals for a regular sticker. But even if you don’t earn any goals, you can still progress to the next part of the story.
I’ve completely changed the grind based nature of the game currently to a more linear path that serves the story, as ultimately CSF is a story based game and I wanted to give the player as much story as possible in a play session. No more grinding out levels over and over- you’ll be able to get a perfect clear on your first run in a level, should you be good enough to get both goals!
As a result of the new gameplay and linear progression, I’ve realized that there was no way to import old saves into this new system, so you’ll need to create a new save for this update. I want to stress that it’s much faster and more fun to progress back to where the story currently ends now, and we’ll still have the original EA version available in a Steam branch should you still want to play that release. We will also have an unlock all levels in the options menu for the EA release that will be removed for v1.0.
Update Cadence
Our first update will bring the game all the way up to the current story beat with the newly revised gameplay systems and game overhaul (I haven’t even mentioned all the bugs and issues that are remedied with this new build!) and will be released in November. Our second update will introduce the next large chapter of the game which we’re aiming for January. Finally, the last section of the game is targeting Feb/March of next year, with console releases and v1.0 releasing soon after that.
I want to thank everyone for their patience- I’m happy to say that with this game I’m also building a backend system that allows us to use many of the features in this game with other future titles we’re making, so that production will be sped up quite considerably for games like Re-Mustard! Thanks again and I can’t wait for y’all to play this brand new game!
FAQ
Will I still keep my old achievements? Yes, all achievements will stay the same except for two: Hi-Five and Speedrun, which reference the old XP system that is no longer in the game. These may get changed into a new achievement or deleted entirely.
Will there be a demo? We plan on offering a new demo before our 1.0 release!
Do I really have to play through the entire game again if I already did so the first time? We will be adding an unlock feature in the options menu that allows you to unlock all levels should you desire- this will be removed in the second update in January. But I must stress that the game is dramatically different than it was before!
Is this a gamepad only game now? No, you can use keyboard of course! It does feel quite nice on the gamepad and Steam Deck however.
Is this Steam Deck compatible? The new release will be fully Steam Deck compatible.
What’s next? Right now we are 100% focused on finishing Cook Serve Forever, though in my off time I’m working on Re-Mustard docs and planning things that I can’t wait to share with you all next year! And after that, who knows…well I know, but I ain’t saying just yet. :D
Thanks again y’all!
-David
CSF September Update!
Hiya! My name is Samantha, and I’ve kidnapped the progress update this month to tell you all about how we cooked up a huge buffet of food art for CSF.
With over 100 foods (and over 500 recipes), designing and drawing out all that deliciousness was a daunting undertaking. But that’s my favorite thing about art—taking crazy ideas from your imagination and figuring out how you can bring them to life. Things like perspective, anatomy, composition, and color all create interesting problems, which frankly have no business being so darned fun. And art for games creates even more challenges to think about: animation, performance, working with UI, and communicating with players through art.
So how do we tackle these challenges, dozens and dozens of times over?
It all starts with research. Like the CSD games, we wanted to have a collection of foods from lots of different cultures. This meant journeying across countless recipe websites, local and travel blogs from around the world, and many deeply compelling Wikipedia rabbit holes. If there’s only one thing I learned during this process, it’s that you haven’t truly lived until you’ve spent an hour untangling the complex web behind the moniker of a certain iconic Canadian pastry (which for legal reasons, shall remain nameless). And it may sound silly, but sometimes the best research is to just get out there and eat a whole bunch of delicious food—there’s a reason we call the IRL food channel #research-and-development in the official Discord server!
Delicious field research, top: Cauliflower steak at a friendship reunion, pre-opera cashew cheesecake, a bike pit stop sundae. Bottom: Dumplings from a long summer sun-kissed night in Reykjavik, pre-karaoke Korean BBQ.
Naturally, with a diverse group of people working together, some personal picks from the Vertigo team also made their way onto the final menu. I don’t want to spoil too much, but we’ve got an Aussie icon coming to the game courtesy of writer Nick, a Japanese-American treat from fellow artist Tristan, and with my partner being from Romania, I couldn’t resist sneaking in one of our own family favorites.
After whetting my appetite with all that tasty research, it was time to get down to work with David (chief food officer) and Lizzy (our lead artist). Let’s take a peek at the process through one of the first foods you’ll encounter in CSF: the doughnut!
First, we came up with a list of ingredients; some “base” ingredients would always stick around, while others guest-starred in different recipes. For the doughnut, the base ingredients were dough and glaze, with optional toppings of chocolate, strawberry, nuts, apples, coconut, and bacon.
Once we had a few dishes under our belt, we’d look for opportunities to repeat these components later on, to help jive with the feeling of cooking from a food cart with a set collection of ingredients each day. This also meant we could re-use some assets between recipes to save on working time and texture space.
After we had a general plan for the ingredients and how they could be prepped and plated in different combinations, I’d sketch out a rough mockup.
Each food started with a kind of “storyboard”, adding ingredients one-by-one to get a feel for how things would look in game. I’d mix and match ingredient combos while drawing to make sure that different sets looked good together.
At this stage, I’d add, remove, and edit ingredients, based on Lizzy and David’s feedback. Next, it was time to dig down into the “rendering” phase: the process of coloring, shading, detailing, and polishing everything. As part of this process, I’d spend some time online looking at close-up photos of different ingredients to understand them better, because there’s nothing quite like staring at ten different macro shots of pecans to get you in the zone.
Once the initial pass was done, I’d get some feedback from Lizzy on tweaking things like color balance, detail placement, and lighting, and we’d be ready for service. Our goal here in the final is to create something that pops with almost impossible warmth and color, while still being grounded in a mostly realistic style.
A quick snapshot of the doughnut process on the left, with the final image on the right.
Speaking of style, getting our food’s visual style figured out was also a cool challenge early on. Food has definitely played a substantial role in my art journey, so it was nice to push that further and adapt to a new style. It took a few tries for me to get that style just right, as I played around with textures and outlines before coming to a softer and more vibrant aesthetic with Lizzy and David’s guidance.
Top, from left: Two previous studies I’d done from reference, an initial style experiment for CSF, and the final style we landed on. Bottom: Some quick paintings I did to familiarize myself with the style (not in-game foods).
After the art for each food was finished, I’d get to come up with some different recipes, which was an amusing exercise in wordplay and an excuse for me to foist a load of truly terrible puns onto the team and our players (sorry, everyone). Consequently, we have the “cocoa nut” doughnut to complement our “Bawkward” chicken sandwich, “Pita Pan” shawarma, and a bacon double-cheese double-patty burger known as “Sir Cholestalot”.
And so, after all that research, drawing, painting, and punning…all that’s left is to do it again a hundred times, and boom! There’s our smorgasbord, ready for players to serve up to the denizens of Helianthus.
THE SANDWICHES ARE HERE.
For me, the coolest thing about working on indie games is getting to see, and help shape, lots of different parts of a project. While most of my time on CSF has been spent on food art, I also got to work on cooking equipment, visual effects, and even lend a hand with a couple of backgrounds and extra characters.
One of my favorite memories from working on CSF is drawing Nori’s cookbook. This one was a super creative task where I got to make plenty of little stickers, magazine clippings, and photos, exploring how Nori’s handwriting and doodles changed as she grew up. There was a lot of collaboration with the story team on this one to connect with the game’s narrative, and it was a ton of fun helping to bring Nori’s cooking journey over the years to life!
The taco page from Nori’s cookbook, with some details added to age it up, and a couple of magazine clippings created for other pages.
On a personal note, I’m endlessly grateful that I’ve gotten to indulge three lifelong passions of mine—art, cooking, and video games—working on a team with such talented, kind, and all-around amazing people. Suffice it to say, being a chef of video game art is a dream come true for me. Of course, the fact that I’ve been a Cook, Serve superfan for almost a decade now certainly doesn’t hurt, either.
I hope you enjoy the food art in CSF, because I had so much fun working on it. And if this post has gotten you hungry for more, join me in grabbing a few doughnuts while you wait for David’s delicious update on the gameplay redesign coming next month. Until then, happy cookin’!
Hi there! I’m Lizzy, Cook Serve Forever’s Art Director. We’re getting very, very close to finishing up the remaining art assets for the game - the team has created some absolutely gorgeous work that I can’t wait for you to see! For this month’s post, I thought I’d give you all a look at how I approach the character art for the game’s visual novel sections (plus a sneak peek at some future scenes).
Among the team, we call these “Dialogue Box” scenes or DBs for short. If a DB requires any new characters or outfit changes, I’ll draw up some rough concepts and send them to the writers for feedback. Usually it’s a pretty quick process, but anything concerning the main characters can take a few rounds of sketches. For example, these are just some of the drawings I made while we were figuring out Brie’s design.
Choosing the right outfit is important! We ended up combining elements from a few of these concepts for her final look.
>> Note: if you haven’t played through the Rhubarb & Grill part of the story, this next section will have some visual spoilers! <<
Once the general designs needed for a scene are settled, I listen to the voice actors’ audio and scribble all over the script like so.
A little on the chaotic side, but it’s basically just me planning out the poses for the Rhubarb & Grill DBs. I use notes like these as a rough guide when I go to draw the character art in Clip Studio Paint. For each character or new outfit, I generally make a “default” pose as well as a bunch of other heads/arms I can switch out with some minor cleanup.
I mix and match these components to create the final assets, rotating and skewing the different parts a bit as I go. Doing so makes the characters seem like they’re shifting their weights, raising their shoulders, etc. as they switch between expressions (which I think looks cool).
So cool, right? Anyway… Once all the art for a scene is finished, I use Photoshop to create mockups of what each line of dialogue should look like in-game. Below is an example of one such mockup from the Rhubarb & Grill section (special shout out to Andrea and Pierre for the beautiful background art!). Other members of the team use images like these as a guide when they construct the DB in GameMaker.
That’s a little different to what’s currently in Cook Serve Forever, isn’t it? That’s right! I want the visual novel portions to feel more like the characters are actually talking to each other, so we’ve redesigned them to display multiple characters at a time. This change is coming in a future update, but I have a few more examples to share with you for now.
Thanks so much for playing! I can’t wait until we can show you more! :)
-Lizzy
CSF July Progress Update!
Hey everyone! Time for our monthly check in on our continuing progress on Cook Serve Forever! And as a cool bonus I’m also excited to show off our all new Point Shop avatar frames and stickers for the entire Cook Serve Delicious series- and you can grab these games at heavy discounts as part of the Steam Daily Deal!
And hey, why not wishlist our upcoming remake, er, Re-Mustard of our original Cook, Serve, Delicious! game? We’ll have more details on all the exciting new features and improvements in Re-Mustard in the future, so be sure to follow as well! Full production of Re-Mustard will begin after we finish Cook Serve Forever and release it as v1.0 early next year.
My original goal was to have some gameplay updates on the game, but I’m not there just yet- I’ve been busy working on our foundational codebase that will allow us to cut development time by 3-4 months with our new games. Since I’m completely starting CSF from scratch I wanted to create some clean code that can be repurposed in the future, as the CSD games have a lot of heavy code that’s hard to parse, much less reuse.
Since we’re redoing the entire game we had an opportunity to improve a lot of the base mechanics and features of the game, including the cutscenes. Now instead of a very static, almost powerpoint presentation of the game you’ll see a much smoother dynamic in animation and in how they’re presented thanks to our Art Director Lizzy Dawson’s redesign!
Given that the story is the most important focus in this game, I wanted to make sure we nailed the presentation aspect and I’m really excited for y’all to see the results! The current plan is to have a major update to the game before the end of the year, with a full release early next year. Art and cutscenes are nearly complete, and all the VO and music has wrapped, so we’re very quickly approaching the end. Woo!
Point Shop Extravaganza
I’ve been a big fan of all the cool stuff you can find in the point shop, and animated frames are easily one of my favorites. We had a whole ton of lore to choose from when making these, so how did we narrow it down for each game? Here’s our artist Tristan with more details!
Hello! As we were creating frames for each of our cooking games, I took a look back at some of the art previously done for CSD 1,2 and 3. You can see what I ended up using for inspiration below as well as what concepts I came up with. For CSD 1, I focused on the environments and weather. For CSD 2 and 3, I focused on the different restaurant and food truck logos. And for CSF I focused on the delivery robots and also the art style of different elements of the game.
I signified the basic idea of movement in the black arrows seen below. We picked a few for each game and I was then tasked with creating the final art. Most of it was just creating the different art assets and hand drawing some of the frames of animation but our writer Nick’s After Effects knowledge really was the MVP for this project. I’m really happy with how they all came out but I think my favorites are the shrine from CSD 1 and sushi belt from CSD 2. I hope you enjoy all our hard work on these when you get to sport them yourself!
More Cook, Serve, Delicious! to Come!
I’m very excited for the future of the CSD series- while we’re busy wrapping up Cook Serve Forever I’m eager to get back into the fast paced mechanics of Cook, Serve, Delicious: Re-Mustard! And hey…who knows what’s next after that. Well, I do, but I can’t really say much more just yet.
Stay tuned and stay delicious!
-David
CSF June Progress Update!
Hi, my name is Nick, and I’m the Voice Director and Co-Writer of Cook Serve Forever. While David is hard at work redesigning the game, I thought I’d update you all on the narrative front, where we are rapidly nearly completion.
Cook Serve Forever is a very narrative rich game. Ryan Matejka and I started writing the game back in early 2021, and by the time we recorded the voice work in July 2022, we had a 250 page screenplay. Unlike previous Cook Serve Delicious games where you play as a silent protagonist (Chef), the spin-off nature of Cook Serve Forever encouraged us to mix things up by featuring a fully-voiced, fully-realized protagonist in Nori Kaga (voiced by Elspeth Eastman). All-in-all, 15 voice actors provided voice work for over 30 characters who appear in the game. Some of whom you’ll have already met in the Early Access build, with the rest coming soon (including a particularly wonderful character voiced by SungWon Cho (ProZD)).
Being an indie team, we don’t have the resources that triple-A studios have, so we had to choose carefully how we delivered our scenes. Throughout the game, you can divide the narrative beats into three different categories:
1. Fully Animated Cutscenes 2. Dialogue Box (still images and text that play in time with the VO) 3. Off-Screen Dialogue (chatter that happens during gameplay)
As you’d expect, fully animated cutscenes are very resource intensive so these are used very sparingly, reserved for the most important story beats.
To create fully animated cutscenes, our Animation Director (Andrea Nagai) works off character designs created by our art team, and after careful storyboarding, painstakingly animates each frame against the completed voice-work. I then composite these frames with the other layers in the scene, and then ship it off to sound design and music for the finishing touches.
Above: Storyboarding (by Andrea Nagai) next to the final scene. In this scene, we hear what Brie’s watching while seeing her reaction to it.
Being able to only use fully animated cutscenes sparingly forces us to be really efficient in our storytelling, in a way that having unlimited resources wouldn’t. Take the opening cutscene of the game. We need to convey several ideas: (1) Chef Rhubarb is a world-renowned chef, who (2) has an incredibly popular TV show, and (3) serves as an idol to our protagonist Nori, who (4) lives a much poorer life than her hero. It’s a complicated scene, that we had to write and storyboard carefully to ensure we were using our resources as effectively as possible.
Above: Stills from the game’s opening cutscene, showing Nori’s childhood obsession with Chef Rhubarb
The narrative portion of the game is nearly complete: we are in the final stages of putting together the last scene in the game. Working on the narrative for Cook Serve Forever has been an amazing experience, and I’m genuinely excited for you all to all experience the wonderful characters and stories the game has to offer when it releases later this year.
CSF May Progress Update!
Hey y’all, my name is Tristan; some of you may know me as Finchfish. I’m one of the artists working at VGI – specifically, I design characters and other art assets that need doing for our games. Before coming onto the team, I was mainly doing freelance editorial illustration for a few magazines. When Covid shut down all the magazines I was previously working on, I was recommended by a friend to Vertigo Gaming Inc. and officially started at the end of 2020. My first assignment was making the art assets for ChefSquad! Today I’m going to be giving a little behind the scenes look at how I designed some of the robot customers in Cook Serve Forever.
So how do we go…
Art Direction Brief
The first step of any type of creative endeavor is to know what the heck you’re making. I received the concept brief of these characters from our Creative Lead David and my Art Director Lizzy. The idea is to make robot characters set in a Solarpunk/Tech future city named Helianthus. The city will include different rings – the outer ring has a more run-down solarpunk aesthetic while the inner ring is more tech-based and wealthy. These robots will be designed to look like they are from specific rings of the city. We also want the robots to be food delivery robots who look like they could live in the same universe as Cook Serve Delicious 3’s Whisk and Cleaver.
Research and Development
Now that I know what to draw, I move on to step two. For this step, I do the same thing I do with every big assignment – I make a Pinterest board. I like to use keywords from the brief such as solarpunk, robot, and futuristic tech to search for and compile images that will inspire my designs. This is such an important step, maybe the most important, of the process because you are building the foundation of everything that comes after. It’s also the step that usually takes the longest and the step that I never really complete until the very end of the piece.
A common misconception about artists is that they just make art. They know how to draw something, and they just do it. However, artists aren’t just artists; they are also researchers. Depending on the piece, we might have to study history, math (ugh), biology, etc., to create believable art. In this case, I research things such as, what defines the solarpunk aesthetic, future technology, what a worn-down robot might look like, and how rust forms. Because, as much as I’d like to say, I've seen The Iron Giant enough times to draw a robot character, the fact is I haven’t. I have to go out of my comfort zone and draw something I don’t think I ever draw – mech.
Concept Sketches
After I’ve compiled all the references I need to get started, I begin digital sketching. We split the work into groups of five robots at a time. For the first group we had time to come up with names before any real concepts. These were names of the companies these robots were made by: Hare, Bolt, Carrier, Winged and Lickety Split.
This group will be a “neutral group” whose designs will work in either ring of the city. The nice part about making different versions of one concept is you can pick aspects of designs to blend together. For example, we liked the overall shape and style of the Carrier’s fourth version, but we added the pigeon-like elements and hair of version one to it so the name made more sense. After we settled on the first group, I sketched a bunch of other ideas I had, some that were leftover from the original group that I liked, such as the bat concept. I gave each bot a ring of the city I think they belonged in, solarpunk or tech.
Character design is one of my favorite things to do art-wise, so this was my favorite part, and even if a design isn’t picked, it’s an idea that I have in my back pocket if I want to use it for something else.
Feedback and Rounds of Review
When I’m happy with the concepts I have, I send them over to David and Lizzy for review. We decide on the characters we want, and I do any small design changes to finalize our new delivery robots! Now we have to think about colors. I draw each robot in a T-pose position, duplicate the lines, and come up with some palettes.
One of my favorite designs was the bee design (seen above.) I decided to call this one Royal Jelly, because that’s what baby bees eat, and if that ain’t the cutest thing. I’m a huge animal and nature nerd, so whenever I can incorporate those elements into a character design, I’m living the dream. Some of the color combinations were actually based on real animals, such as Blue Carpenter Bees, Honduran White Bats and Koi Fish to name a few. The color combo options are once again sent for review, and now we have to pose and render them!
Art Style and Final Work
Creative people are notoriously bad at taking compliments and being too hard on themselves about their art. I’ve struggled with accepting that my style of art is not as recognizable as bigger artists I admire with unique styles. That’s because I tend to illustrate in many different styles, and if you are an artist and also have a varied style, I’m here to tell you that that is ok! In fact, sometimes it can be extremely helpful. In the case of these character designs, I was tasked to make them a similar style to Lizzy’s designs of Whisk and Cleaver and also the human characters that had already been created for the game at that point, Nori and Chef Rhubarb. This means I needed to study Lizzy’s art and dissect it in a way, to figure out which techniques I need to use for the final look of my robots.
The hardest part of this last step is making the first robot. After I’ve figured out the style and process of how to get from sketch to final product, I just repeat those steps for each robot. That first robot acts almost as an instruction book for the rest.
1. I started with a sketch as I do with any rendering. 2. The lineart was drawn and cleaned, then colored in certain places the light would be hitting. 3. The basic colors from the color palette choices are put down. 4. Then I use a soft brush to add some soft shading. 5. Then a solid brush is used to add a cel shading looking effect, adding some bolder highlights and shadows. 6. The shiny shading is used to help indicate the metal material of the robot. 7. The final step is to add some soft color adjustments in an overlay layer to the whole piece. It’s usually pretty subtle, but I think it makes the character seem more real and as if the different colors are reacting to each other a bit more.
The only extra step is for the Solarpunk ring robots, who receive a bit of rust treatment to give them more of that worn down metal look. Once the art is finished and approved, it eventually gets put in the game! You can see the rest of the delivery robot characters below. It’s always rewarding to see them all together.
If you made it to the end, I want to thank you so much for reading! I hope this was entertaining and maybe even educational. If you would like to see more behind the scenes art like this from my work at VGI, you can check out my Patreon. You can also follow me elsewhere here. Support the arts, be kind, and thank you again for taking time to learn more about my work!
- Finch
CSF April Progress Update!
Hey everyone! We've been workin' hard on the next redesign for CSF, and we are at a place where I'd like to share some prototype images and talk about where the game is headed.
Note that the image below is very much subject to change- there's a lot of placeholder assets and text but is a general idea of what the gameplay is right now code-wise.
Keep the Chill, Add Some Thrill
The first thing I want to stress is that we're leaning more into the narrative story based aspects of the game along with keeping the "chill" vibes of CSF- my intention is not to turn this into a fast paced action game like the CSD series.
At the same time I know that the gameplay was lacking a bit with our original concept, and now that I'm the lead programmer I can really get into the game's mechanics in a way that wasn't possible with our original release. I think the fundamentals were there, but there were a lot of aspects that slowed the game down that wasn't very fun (such as holding down buttons and releasing them too early).
What I'd like to do with this new redesign is create more opportunities for players to get better at the game. To do this, we need to add some more mechanics that let the player essentially get ahead of the game in a way that's fun and rewarding. By that I mean, think of the holding stations in CSD 3 that allowed you to prep food before the next stop- it was a totally optional mechanic for some foods, but players were rewarded for it if they chose to do so. There's nothing really like that in CSF right now- you basically press the buttons and are rewarded instantly, which is fine for a time, but that kind of gameplay will start to drag the further into the game you get.
The gameplay shot I posted breaks ingredients down into types of prep, and allows the players to "combine" like prep segments. For example, if you have two burger orders and two meat patties to make, you can do so by completing the button sequence on both, or you can combine the two ingredient preps together and do them at the same time. This cuts down on time, which is now how we determine if a food is "delicious, good, average or bad".
The timer starts to tick down the moment you start prepping a food, but you can combine ingredients without the timer starting- which means you can go through each order, combine like prep orders, and get it all ready to go before you start smashin' keys and prepping cheese.
There will be two modes in the game- "Chef Mode" and "Story Mode," much like the Standard and Chill modes of the previous games. Chef Mode has the timer and food rankings mentioned above, with the chance to fail a day. Story Mode removes the timer and allows the player to play at their own pace without fear of failure, perfect for those who just want to progress through the story. I'm also changing the way holographic stickers are earned, so that there's less grinding. In fact there's going to be much less grinding in general- I want the game to progress thru the story at a good pace so that you're always getting new story bits with each day played.
Speaking of which, for the next few updates you'll be hearing from our artists, writers and directors on how they've been shaping the game's story with VO, cutscenes and lots more. I'm so excited for y'all to get the next chapter of the game and once I get further along in the gameplay side of things I'll be sharing some gameplay videos and lots more!
Thanks again for all the support!
-David
CSF February Progress Update!
Hey everyone! David here with another progress update on Cook Serve Forever and what's been happening behind the scenes, woo!
Trading Card Update
As I've been reworking the entire game- check last month's update for more details- I thought it'd be fun to release Trading Cards in the meantime! Those should be going out later today, and there's all kinds of cool badges and emotes to earn. You'll even get to see some locations that will be available further in the game- enjoy!
Game Progress
Originally I was going to be doing Cook Serve Forever during the week, and porting our original Cook, Serve, Delicious! game on the weekend. I quickly found out that wasn't working well at all- going back and forth between projects had me losing a lot of time as I had to figure out where I left off and I kept getting confused with parts of code that I thought were in one project but were in another, etc.
Furthermore I found that as I was porting CSD 1 to PS4/Xbox (we have some announcements on that next week, be sure to sub to my Bluesky account or our Twitter account!) I was getting a lot of ideas how to tackle CSF since I was completely rewriting it. So I went ahead and bit the bullet and just got those ports finished- and as of today CSD 1 for PS4/Xbox, as well as CSD 1/2/3 for PS5, is currently in cert! Whew, five platforms at once is a lot!
Now that I have those behind me I have some better ideas on how to handle CSF so that the v1.0 transition is fast and easier than it has been in the past. This does mean my original timeline of getting a public beta this month isn't going to happen, but I don't want to rush out another build before it's ready- I want to make sure it's a solid foundation to build off of.
Next month I'll be showing off the first gameplay screens of the newly redesigned CSF! I'm really excited to see what people think. Until then we'll keep cookin'!
