Game Description
Being a solo chef is no easy job, cook, clean, and serve the customers without losing your temper. Nobody is perfect, and you’re bound to miss someone, but in this restaurant, “the customer is always dangerous”. Defend yourself as you serve the good customers and do everything you can to finish the shift alive, all while getting a good review of course.
Chef Strikes Back is an isometric genre blend of a cooking simulator and a hack-n-slash. During your shift, you will combine ingredients in different cooking stations to make either spaghetti or pizza. Customers have limited patience, and should it run out they will violently express their anger and try to disrupt you in their own way. You’ll have to put a stop to their rampage to continue serving customers or escape with your life.
This is a team project that was developed for 11 Months.
Unity 2021.3.15f
My Role?
Game Designer, Technical Designer, UI Designer, Pixel Artist
Meet The Team
Sophie Hissen
Sound Designer, Voice Actor
KwanTo Leung
AI Programmer
JunPeng Huang
Programmer
Tiffany Nguyen
Sound Designer
Kaisei Meighan
Music Composer
Gabriela Lopez
Character Designer, Character Animator, Voice Actress
Peyton Briska
Character Designer, Character Animator
Game Mechanics
Throwing
Throwing is what the player is doing 70% of the time, you throw an ingredient you picked up into the Pizza Oven. You throw the finished Pizza onto the Customer’s plate. This mechanic was made to combat having to keep the restaurant layouts small.
Serving Customers
When a Customer enters the restaurant they will walk to a random unoccupied seat. Once they are seated a speech bubble will appear over their head displaying what they have ordered. Underneath the speech bubble is a progress bar that will slowly tick down. You have until the timer runs out to serve the Customer the correct dish.
Angry Customer Types
There are four different Customers: Frank, Jill, Joaquin, and Karen. Each will react differently when they run out of patience.
Frank - Will go to another random Customer who is still waiting to be served and annoys them. This speeds up their timer, if Frank makes the Customer Angry he will move on to the next Customer waiting to be served or attack the player if there are none.
Jill - Walks to one of the food stations and shuts it down, making it unusable until the player attacks her.
Joaquin - Will attack the player by shooting at them from a range. There is a short delay between shots.
Karen - Runs straight for the player and attacks them.
Attacking
Once a Customer has turned Angry they cannot be turned back. The only way to get rid of them is by killing them. Attacking a Non-Angry Customer three times will make every Customer currently in the restaurant angry and attack the player.
Cooking
There are two dishes in Chef Strikes Back, Pizza and Spaghetti. Both are made using one of each ingredient, Tomatoes, Cheese, and Dough.
To make a Pizza you have to throw all three ingredients into the Pizza Oven. For Spaghetti you have to do the same but in the Cauldron.
Gameplay
Blending the Cooking Simulator and Hack-n-Slash genres was challenging. We went through numerous iterations before we reached something that players and ourselves were happy with.
One of the problems we ran into was that player feedback showed that they loved the way the attacking felt, so much so in fact, that they would intentionally not cook at all and just fight the customers. We played around with the idea of integrating the attacking into the cooking process but concluded it might be better to reward the player for serving the customers.
Technical Design
This is where I had the most fun working on this project, during the early stages when we were testing new mechanics and iterating ideas. I worked as the bridge between the Designers and the Programmers, brainstorming mechanics and systems with the Designers and then conveying our ideas to the Programmers and working alongside them to implement them.
UI
Through working on the UI I learned something that I apply to a great number of things in game development. I learned to make it as modular as possible to ensure that it can be reused easily. I also learned to create a “hierarchy” to ensure that if someone else on the team needed to work on something they would be able to understand where everything goes to minimize time spent.
Art
I had begun learning pixel art a short time before joining this project. Once we were past the prototype stage and the systems that needed to be implemented surpassed my coding skills I allocated my time to making art assets for the game. It was a great opportunity that allowed me to improve my skills.
What I Learned
The value of communication.
How to communicate effectively.
How to manage my time.
