Welcome to Sizzle!

Hardy:

Hello! I’m here to talk about some of our plans for this game, and what to expect in future updates.

Ultimately, we want to make a chill, cozy game that gives you the feeling of becoming a master chef as you progress. I plan to achieve this through a detailed cooking system that uses many different ingredients and tools, and a recipe system that encourages discovery and experimentation. 

Cooking

We will experiment with more mechanics and interactivity, such as temperature controls and timing requirements for taking food off the heat, or bottles that need to be carefully tipped to pour out. There is a careful balance needed to keep these steps from becoming tedious, and to allow for casual play at a comfortable pace. One way to handle this could be to add quality ratings to dishes. The basic version may be easy to complete, while mastery of the cooking mechanics is required to achieve perfection. 

Side Activities

Where do all your ingredients and tools come from? We’d like to create a world full of things to do and people to talk to- where you can find new ingredients, complete quests to unlock tools, and uncover hints to secret recipes. The things you cook will help you move through this world and befriend its inhabitants. The larger world is a long-term goal for this project that will be added to gradually - the focus will still mostly be on cooking.

Recipes and Discovery

“Wisdom is knowing that tomatoes do not go in a fruit salad”. It should be possible to make any dish in the game as long as you have the right tools and materials. Many steps should be easy to figure out on your own with some common sense. Some recipes will be given to you freely, others will have to be earned. A few may be completely hidden, and require experimentation to discover.

And of course, we want to add lots of new ingredients, recipes, and dishes!

Max:

I thought it would be cool to talk about the process of how the scene was designed, and show some of the steps I took in designing it.

We took some inspiration from the cooking minigame in Dragon’s Crown, and you can see that with the piles of food in the initial sketch I did. 

Those piles of food will most likely make a return once there are more ingredients in play.

I initially had some trouble visualizing the perspective of the scene, so I recreated how I thought it should look in blender.

We also knew from the start we would be going for a pixel art style, so I did some research into common resolutions for old hardware. The resolution is actually based on the Neo Geo platform! I always loved how big and detailed Neo Geo games were (Metal Slug, King of Fighters, the wonderfully huge golfer sprites in Neo Turf Masters,) so I took a lot of inspiration from that space.

Once I had blocked out the scene everything else just came together, mostly. I didn’t restrict myself to a specific palette, but tried to keep the color space on individual sprites fairly tight, and I drew everything in the same canvas to avoid similar colors and to make sure nothing would feel out of place.

And that’s about it for this first dev log, thanks again to everyone who has already checked out our little prototype, we’re excited to keep iterating on it, and excited to add many delicious dishes to cook!

• Max & Hardy, from Jet Drift Collective