Critics, Parties & Mailbox
about 1 month ago – Sat, Mar 23, 2024 at 11:02:59 AM

Hi Chefs! We have worked on numerous features over the past few months, and we are excited to show some of the highlights in this update. As we approach our early access launch, it felt necessary to update the most important feature of Chef RPG, which is the gameplay surrounding the restaurant.

MAILBOX

Before setting up the new restaurant features, an important feature that was added to Chef RPG is the mailbox. You can now receive new mail from time to time, activating new quests are receiving story-related messages from different characters. NPCs that you befriend or romance can also send you gifts from time to time. Leftover items from quests that could not be added to your inventory will also be delivered here. I think the possibilities with the mailbox are endless. In the future, we can even add things like advertisements and fliers – things that add to the lore of the game world.

PARTIES

You can now host events inside your restaurant. Events are a part of some character and story quests, but you may also accept party contracts at a Bulletin board to earn some extra rewards. Parties include things like birthdays, BBQs, and even private meals. Once you accept a party contract at a Bulletin, an icon will appear in your restaurant to allow you to host the event. You should aim to meet the preferences of the host – aspects such as food type and décor type - to gain a higher satisfaction rating. During events, the host will also give a speech to their guests, and each party variation will have a different set of unique dialogues.

CRITICS

Critics will play an important role in Chef RPG’s story. Aside from the story, numerous critics will visit your restaurants from time to time, giving an added challenge to the restaurant gameplay. After the critic’s visit, they will write a review, which can be found in your mailbox the next day.

REVIEWS

Reviews are composed of multiple segments. For example, the first segment of the review will mention your character’s progress in the world. The next segment will mention your restaurant’s reputation. Other segments will mention the overall food quality, critic’s favorite dish, quality of service, level of experimentation with the menu, and the quality of the interior décor. Reviews will have a larger impact on your restaurant’s reputation and increase your chance of receiving awards.

UI UPDATES

Several UIs surrounding the restaurant have been updated. The recipes UI has been changed to a new “parchment” style and now includes additional info such as meat/vegetarian type, research type, and sell price. The restaurant management UI has also been updated to be more visually focused and requires less reading of text. Recipe UI will now display whether the dish is a meat dish, vegetarian dish, or a vegan dish. The same info will be displayed for your entire menu.

MORE RESTAURANT UPDATES

A few more restaurant-related features will be implemented for the early access release to give the gameplay further depth. More will be revealed soon!

BETA APRIL 26

For alpha-tier backers, the demo for Chef RPG will be automatically updated to the Beta version on April 26. A lot of new content will be added, and save states from the alpha version will unfortunately not be able to be transferred over. However if you have worked hard collecting up a lot of items and furniture, we will provide a method for transferring parts of your save file. Since we are close to release, the beta will require an NDA and will not be available for streaming to avoid spoilers.

TRAILER COMING SOON

That’s all for now! The trailer for Chef RPG will be released in June, which will announce the exact early access release date. We are very excited to share the new trailer, as it will reveal the culmination of the cool new features that our team have been working on. Thank you for reading! Check out the latest devlog if you want to see how the new critic and party systems were implemented.

QUESTS, SKILLS, & RELEASE PLAN
3 months ago – Wed, Jan 31, 2024 at 12:21:21 PM

Hi Chefs! I hope you have enjoyed your holidays and I’m excited to present our plan moving forward with Chef RPG. Since completing the Kickstarter 2 years ago, it became increasingly apparent that the scope of the game exceeded the timeline initially allotted for the release. Certain aspects of the game took longer than expected to implement, numerous art assets were redrawn, and new additions were added into the game that were not initially planned. For us, since this is a multiyear passion project that we poured our heart into, we want to make a great game that makes the past few years of hard work worthwhile.

Over the past year, a lot of publishers showed interest in the game and offered to provide additional funding. However, upon further discussions with multiple publishers, issues with publisher contracts made me uncomfortable to enter a partnership. So, moving forward, we will continue to self-publish Chef RPG. Although it would be great to launch the game when everything we envisioned has been implemented, it would require a lot of additional time and funding to achieve. When reviewing the overall timeline of future features, it also became apparent that a lot of time-consuming work – such as adding a second city and an extended story, aren’t really essential items to the main gameplay loop. The core game is mostly complete, and I don’t want you guys to wait forever for the game to satisfy a personal desire for a perfect 1.0 release.

Due to these reasons, our new plan is to release Chef RPG first in early access, which will provide enough funding for finishing the additional features we envisioned. The game will be mostly complete but centered around the first town. The second city, the Fishing platform, and some other features will be added to the game during the early access period.

Since the game will first be released in early access, certain stretch goals and rewards will unfortunately not be included in the first launch. This would include the World Atlas and Culinary guide books, since more art assets will be created later on in development.

We plan to launch into Early Access around the end of July this year for PC and Mac, and continue to work towards a 1.0 and Switch release. We thank you for your patience and understanding over the course of this development journey and we are excited to bring you the game in a few months.

Now, let’s jump into some new additions to the game!

QUESTS

We have completed a preliminary system for quests which will allow us to build quests quickly in the future. Every character has their own quests that offer unique rewards. We want to create quests that exceed simple fetch quests, but rather offer a unique story and range of activities that take you across different places in the game world.

One such quest is repairing April’s Crystal ball, which was destroyed when a boar broke into her home. For a quick summary of this quest:  you must first extract a perfect quartz crystal from the seaside caves. Then, the crystal should be taken to a local artisan to be polished into a perfect sphere. The sphere must be blessed by the spirits of the deep forest, whom require food offerings that you will need to prepare. When the blessed crystal ball is returned to April, you will receive unique rewards that cannot be obtained anywhere else. More character quests of a similar length will be added to the game, along with main story quests that will direct the overall gameplay.

SKILLS SYSTEM

Alpha testers will know that the skill system has been deactivated over the course of testing. This decision was due to the game being ever evolving, and new features will disrupt a previously established skill system. Now that we have a finalized idea of what features will be in the game, the skill system has been overhauled and reintegrated into the game. There are currently 36 skills/perks in the game. 

Skills are separated into four categories : General, Gathering, Cooking, and Social. The level cap prevents players from unlocking every skill, so choosing which skill to unlock will become an important decision for customizing your playthrough and creating a build. Most skills are now functional, however there are a few unique skills that require coding some additional systems and UI to implement.

NEW AREAS

Two new outdoor maps have been added to the game. We don’t want to reveal too much at the moment, but here are two screenshots from the new areas.

CUSTOM BACKER REWARDS

• For backers who have purchased custom statues / portraits.

The original plan was to place the name plaques and custom statues & portraits in the Culinary Academy. Since the academy is located in Billboard City, which won’t be available during the early access, I have instead decided to move these items into a temporary location in White Ash Harbor. These items will be displayed in the Hotel Rose Gallery in White Ash Harbor during the early access period. When early access ends, the statues and portraits will be moved to the academy, and the gallery will receive a different gameplay function.

We have begun creating some custom statues for backers. Emails have been sent out again so be sure to complete the attached form so that we can immortalize your avatar in the game! It would be great to complete everyone’s custom orders for the early access. However, if you do miss it, we can always add you in later as well.

BETA

As mentioned previously to alpha backers, we will launch a beta that you will have access to. Due to the change to the development timeline, we will stop updating the alpha for now and open the beta sometime around the middle of April. More information regarding the beta will be provided in the next update.

MORE TO COME

We have also worked on some cool items that we don’t want to reveal at the moment. A new trailer will be revealed in a few months which will give a better overview of the new additions to the game as well as provide an exact release date. Thank you for reading! Check out the latest devlog if you want to see how the new quest system was built.

RESEARCH FACILITIES + HAPPY HOLIDAYS
5 months ago – Tue, Nov 28, 2023 at 05:08:43 PM

Hey everyone! This will be the last update for the year so I wanted to take the opportunity to wish you a happy holidays before we jump into 2024!

We’ve made quite a lot of progress over the past 2 months, and I’m going to dive into some of the main features as well as the thought process behind some designs we are implementing in Chef RPG. The main focus for this update will be on Research Facilities, which will play an important role for the “RPG” aspects of the game.

RESEARCH FACILITIES

Currently, 6 different research facilities have be implemented, each focusing on a specific recipe type. To avoid spoilers, this update will only display one of these research facilities : the BBQ Pit.

There are two different activities you can do inside a research facility : research & enhancement. Both involve completing cooking minigames to progress.

RESEARCH

Mix different ingredients in a cooking appliance to progress your research. After gaining a research level, you may unlock a new BBQ recipe, or unlock a new BBQ skill that will apply powerful buffs to your restaurant. These skills can improve the quality of your dishes, cooking speed of certain cooking appliances, and happiness of customers when consuming certain dishes.

Due to the powerful boosts provided by research facilities, a maximum of 2 of 6 research facilities can be active at a time. So choosing the type of food you serve will become an important decision when progressing through the game.

ENHANCEMENT

You can also improve your existing recipes by adding new ingredients to them, raising their dish level. This will allow you to further customize your menu and focus on taking advantage of specific ingredients to maximize customer satisfaction and profit.

SKILL SYSTEM OVERHAUL

The implementation of research facilities will be helpful when overhauling the character skills system, which is currently deactivated in the alpha. In the future, we will likely create a new UI that consolidates all of your active skills & buffs (whether from skill tree, research, or other) in one panel, so you can more easily analyze and optimize your character build for the type of character you want to play.

NEW MAPS

Finally, we are constantly expanding the game world with a goal to make the open-world feel alive and “lived-in”. These are some of the new locations we’ve been working on over the past 2 months.

NEW CHARACTER HOMES

A few more NPC homes have been added to the game.

REC CENTER

A new recreational center has been added to White Ash Harbor. This will be a new location were characters often come to hang out. You can often find Aime the bodybuilder here. Currently, the Rec Center doesn’t serve any gameplay functions. We will likely add some activities/minigames to this location in future.

LIBRARY

A small library has been added to the game. Since kids will soon be implemented into the game, the library will double as a classroom for the few kids in White Ash Harbor. You will also be able to discover some secrets if you search the bookcases.

BILLBOARD CITY

We are constantly developing Billboard city in the background. It’s a very exciting item to work on, but also very time-consuming since a lot of art needs to be created. We don’t want reveal too much about the city, but here are two shots of areas of the city (they have already appeared in Devlog videos).

CHEF RPG DELAY

That’s it for now! As mentioned in a previous update, the final game release will unfortunately be delayed by quite a bit since some features have taken a bit longer than expected, and the scope of the game changing over the past 2 years. We are working our hardest to develop and complete the game as quickly as possible. We apologize for the wait, and sincerely thank you for supporting this game that started out as a small solo project, and has grown into something bigger as a result of your contributions.

For now, we hope you enjoy your holidays and have a great start to 2024!

Alpha Version 0.2 Live!
7 months ago – Tue, Oct 10, 2023 at 11:02:24 PM

This post is for backers only. Please visit Kickstarter.com and log in to read.

Farming System
8 months ago – Thu, Aug 24, 2023 at 08:19:07 PM

Hey chefs! We have been hard at work implementing some new systems into Chef RPG, and are excited to share what we have worked on over the past 2 months. After receiving a lot of feedback from alpha testers, one challenge encountered by players who progressed further was the difficulty of collecting additional ingredients to sustain a larger restaurant. In this update, a farming system has been developed, which gives players an additional method of gathering veggies and fruits.

Farming Design

For now, farming will be contained to inside April’s Greenhouse. There is a limited amount of space in the greenhouse, forcing players to be selective about which crops to  grow to supplement their menu, rather than growing ingredients to sell to shops. We want to design farming to feel optional, so you only feel the need to pursue farming for certain builds. For example, you will get the most out of the greenhouse if you want to run a vegan restaurant or a fruit cocktail pub.

Growing Plants

Seeds should be planted on the ground and watered each day to grow a plant. After a few days, the crop will be fully grown, at which you will be able to harvest its ingredients. There are three plant types: regular plants that disappear after harvesting, and bushes and trees that you can harvest multiple times.

Clearing Plants

To remove a plant, we added a spade tool to dig up the plant patch. Removing plant patches can reward you with seeds, as well as plant roots, which can be given to NPCs to craft special items.

Flexibility & Design

The greenhouse is designed within a buildable grid system, which allows you to place furniture as well. To place furniture on soil, you must first place a floor tile to cover the soil. You can combine plants and furniture to design your ideal greenhouse space.

Brewing Updates

On another note, we’ve made a few more updates to the brewing system. More alcohol items have been added, including Cachaca (Brazil), Raki (Turkey), BaiJiu (China), Brandy (made from wine), and Mead (made from honey). In the final game, these new alcohols might not be used as ingredients in cooking, but can still be sold to shops for a good profit, or gifted to certain NPCs.

A brewing recipe page has been added as well. After a successful brew, the alcohol’s brewing process will be displayed on this page. It is accessible from any brewing machine so you won’t need to memorize all of the steps.

New Maps

Finally, we have started work on creating Billboard City, as well as finishing up the remaining interiors in White Ash Harbor. To avoid spoilers, we won’t be revealing any info about Billboard City in the near future. For now, here is a sneak peek of a new interior in White Ash Harbor.

Note To Alpha Testers*

Both the brewing and farming systems have not been patched into the alpha version yet. We will release a big patch in a couple of weeks containing the two systems, along with gameplay balances, bug fixes, new interior maps, and new items.

Farming Devlog

That’s it for now! If you wish to check out an in-depth development log detailing the design of the farming system, check out the latest video here: