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[TrinketBen]

Battle Chef Brigade

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Battle Chef Brigade is a 2D action cooking and hunting game that fuses the dangerous flora and fauna of a traditional fantasy universe with the lightning pace and creative passion of your favorite cooking competitions.

The campaign in Battle Chef Brigade has you play as three different chefs vying against one another to win the annual Battle Chef Royale. Each elimination round, chefs must produce as many quality dishes as they can before the time limit is up. Contestants must also be careful to mind the round’s required ingredients, special rules, and the preferences of each judge. Of course, Battle Chefs only work with the freshest ingredients that they've gathered themselves. So if you’re seeking the finest filet of dragon, you’ll have to subdue the mighty beast yourself in the Kitchen Stadium Arena. The winner of the tournament gains induction to the renowned Battle Chef Brigade: a cadre of those with the most elite martial and culinary skill.

Gameplay Screenshots

Game Overview

One of our design tenets is that cooking in Battle Chef Brigade needs to be more than button mashing and following instructions. A cooking competition is about so much more than rote mechanical movements: it's about the creativity of combining ingredients, the improvisation of plans, the execution of technique, and the science of balancing tastes and textures. All of these are factors that play into the judges’ evaluation of your dish. Many of these stats are given to you in the game, while others must be learned through trial and error. If you've ever juggled cooking multiple parts of a real recipe simultaneously, that represents a large part of the challenge we’re trying to convey. Furthermore, the game’s setting lets us inject all of the grandiose ridiculousness from shows like Iron Chef, amplified to a fantasy scale. Expect geysers of water erupting from super-boiled stews.

The Trinket Studios Team

Tom Eastman @TrinketTom President + Programming + Design
Eric Huang @TrinketEric Creative Director + Design
Ben Perez @TrinketBen Programming + Design

We also get a lot of help from our friends who graciously offer their time as contractors:

George Hufnagl @grhufnagl Sound Design
Yann Blomquist  Environment Art
Tom Dunkin @tomaeusd  Composer
Christine Chong @mayshing Colorist
Mike Antonicelli @superfantastik Colorist

Background

We’re three devs from Chicago who quit our jobs at Disney three years ago to go indie because we wanted the creative control to make something awesome. Tom and I are programmers who’ve been using Unity professionally for 4 years. Eric formerly worked in the commercial industry in New York, with us as the staff concept artist at Disney, and now as our creative director and general art wizard.

We released two tiny mobile games in Spring 2013, but Battle Chef Brigade is really the dream game we quit our jobs to make. The idea started with our team taking lunch breaks during production of our last two mobile games. We’d often crowd around a little TV and watch Iron Chef or Chopped while munching on our meals. One day, something really just clicked about the gaminess and drama of the original Iron Chef’s show intro, and we knew we wanted to do right by that feeling.

Art Style

Our biggest remaining tasks are related to our painstaking art style. There are very few shortcuts to creating hand-drawn animations and environments. Our tools help smooth out the process, but each chef and monster still requires a lot of Photoshop time! As a programmer I don’t really feel qualified to speak too much about the intricacies of how Eric does what he does, but if you’d like to know more, you can reach out to him @TrinketEric, or post in this thread and I’ll direct his attention to the post.

Tech

On the programming side, we've been building out systems and tools in Unity to make integrating new characters, foods, and chef challenges a straightforward process. We also invested a good chunk of our time building a solid Arena combat system. We've taken inspiration from some of our favorite games, like Super Smash Bros., Awesomenauts, and Blaz Blue.

All that said, we’re really excited to start building out more design content on top of those systems! I’m also looking forward to posting in this devlog about various problems we’ve encountered and how we solved them.

Current State

As an internal milestone, we’re aiming to have a tutorial demo done in the next month to coincide with a Kickstarter campaign we’ll also be launching. As mentioned above, most of the time invested in completing this game will be on the art team. A tremendous amount of time goes into achieving the fluidity and scale we’re looking for in Battle Chef Brigade. As you can tell by these introductory shots of the game, art tends to advance in staggered parallel, meaning that our background artist is working at the same time that Eric is working on sketches and key poses at the same time that our colorists are working on coloring in frames of animation. The demo I mentioned will hopefully be a vertical slice -- a fully colored, fluidly animated and polished subset of the full monster menagerie and chef roster. Beyond art, we’re working to make the vertical slice tutorial level clearer for new players, at which point we’ll start ramping up playtesting. We’re also refining the judging mechanics to be clearer to understand but more interesting to solve.

Thanks!
TrinketBen

[TrinketBen]

I just wanted to follow up our initial post with some less general information:

First of all, I just wanted to note that we’ve been posting a few random development posts to our Battle Chef Brigade blog and company blog. Silly us for not starting a TIGSource thread earlier!

Tom and I being programmers tend to post mostly about engineering related stuff, though occasionally we delve into design topics. Tom’s most recent post (which the .gif below belongs to) about how we set up a lightweight Matinee system for capturing Kickstarter footage is pretty cool. The sketches are from an earlier post Eric did detailing his thought process about how to start in on combat animations.






Secondly, here’s a quick composite screenshot of progress we’ve made with the game over the past year or so.



We spent a lot of time prototyping the creative Kitchen mode, since it’s the toughest design challenge. Early experiments included controlling multiple chefs at once, number heavy taste/texture systems, and puzzle-combo-like ingredient-mixing mechanics. These prototypes were invaluable for us for nailing down which aspects of cooking could be nicely abstracted into mechanics and which were just too clunky.

Hoping to do another post tomorrow!

[Tuba]

The art is amazing, nice job guys.

The whole idea of a cooking brawler is pretty cool, can't wait to see some gameplay.

[William Chyr]

Finally! Also, that's some mouthwatering art.

[kingdinosaurgames]

Beautiful art!

[Jad]

I SEE YOU GOT YOSHINARI YOU'S CLONE ON THE ART. GOOD GOING WITH THAT.

Honestly though? A realistically proportioned standard anime person suddenly looks a bit stiff and out of place at that size screen-wise. If you ever do a re-take re:art I'd suggest trying something more chibi and more dynamic.

Regardless the art is absolutely bonkers baller, Eric's draftsmanship is making me baseball bat mad right now

fuck eric >:C

<3<3<3<3<3<3

[grhufnagl]

Hi All,

George here - I am leading the sound design and implementation for Battle Chef Brigade and wanted to introduce myself. I will be responding with occasional updates, starting with an audio overview video to be released during the Kickstarter campaign. Looking forward to sharing!

Thanks,

George

[TrinketBen]

Update #2, 8.28.14

First off, thanks for the kind words y'all! Also, hi George!

Not too much to report here. Tom's largely still churning away on Kickstarter preparations -- setting up matinees to highlight footage we want to include in the launch video.

Tom did have a chance to integrate Yann's latest Kitchen background art, and it's looking so much better than it did in the previous rough sketch version.

Eric's churning away on Mina animations. Last I heard I think we've got all of the Arena animations colored and back from Christine, but overall we're waiting to do a big export-from-Photoshop-and-into-atlases push.

I spent most of the day continuing to work on the tutorial/demo level for BCB. The previous iteration started by introducing you to the Arena and then instructing you to cook the ingredients in the Kitchen, which after some thought was an inversion of priorities. So, in response to that, I'm trying to go through meticulously to think about what information needs to be presented in what order.

As part of that I made some changes to the way we present a round's required ingredient. Previously the camera would just warp to a sprite of the ingredient, then pan up to the judges. However, I'm currently thinking about introducing this flow in the middle of the tutorial round, after you've learned the control scheme and the basics of cooking. Anyways, as part of that push, I thought it'd be better if there was a little more drama and action to the ingredient reveal.

Here's a first pass:



I think the fade before the reveal is too dark, and I want to adjust the easing function that controls the camera zoom and position change, but for now it'll suffice.

[TrinketTom]

Hey everyone! Thanks for all the kind words about BCB It means a lot to us and motivates us to keep at it!

I'm Tom, the President of Trinket (which mainly just means I'm in charge of faxes when I'm not programming).

As Ben mentioned, I'm spending all my time preparing for the Kickstarter, so I thought I'd stop by to share what I've been working on lately.

Eric has his work cut out for him as Trinket's only artist, so I've been trying to help out where possible. Fire is one area where I was happy to pitch in. Since fire is integral to cooking, dragons, and spells, Eric asked me early on to think about what procedural methods we could use for in-game fire. We'll probably end up using a blend of particles and hand-drawn fire, but here are some of the cool references for stylized, 2D fire we looked at.

You can see the rest in this imgur album. I've also put the video or Unity Asset Store links in there where appropriate.

We liked the Kung Fu Panda 2-style fire the most. It's got an illustrated feel while still being very procedural. It's actually made using colored spherical particles that are masked by black ones on the sides!

So, I installed After Effects and followed

. We don't have Trapcode Particular, so I just used the default particles.

Here are my results! Getting it kinda working nicely in After Effects should save Eric some time when he transforms it into something amazing

So there you have it! Fire will really help our video look cool, though we'll see how we use it in-game. I'm currently leaning towards rendering out a single gout of flame to a grayscale spritesheet and then animating it and coloring it in the shader. Layering a few of those with different gradients might look pretty spiffy. We could also do the full particle masking technique in a render texture, though requiring a render texture for each part of the flame and a ton of particles seems like a bad idea.

Cheers!
Tom

[TrinketTom]

Yesterday and today were spent trying to capture smoother gameplay footage out of the Unity Editor. I borrowed an elgato game capture HD from the Young Horses (of Octodad fame) and finally got it set up after a lot of cable wrangling. As I was testing I ran into an old bug, where a puffed-up Squid wouldn't do his hit react the first time he's hit. I switched the game to ultra-slow-mo and saw that he only spent a single frame in his hit react action. Here's a sceneview screenshot I took while paused, examining the Squid.



There are some little details that I enjoy about this. The text box below the exploding squid is great for debugging simple Action System issues. It tells us what Action the Squid is in (ActionDie), how 'strong' that Action is (Uninterruptible), what animation the entity is playing (explode), what percentage of the animation has gone by (32%?), and what 'Room' the Entity is currently in (Arena).

The yellow lines are evidence of a somewhat silly shutdown order issue. Each line points from the Squid through an Entity that it has sensed (each Entity has sensor triggers that are used for targeting things or general AI). The line segments actually end off screen, at the distance that would cause the Squid to forget about the sensed Entity. The fun thing here is that the exploding Squid has sensed his own innards, the stomach and head exploding up and left of the main body 

[TrinketBen]

Today marks probably the first time we have a screenshot of actual gameplay that's fully colored and near to a final representation of what we want to deliver for our vertical slice!

It's such a good feeling to pull down updates from SVN and to see that Eric or Tom has integrated new finalized art. That said, Tom and I were talking and it seems pretty clear that at some point in the nearish future we're going to need to do an effect (particle and sprites) pass. The problem is that when I look at this screenshot, although the character and critters look amazing, the view is too static -- the bull appearing to be moving towards Mina, but there aren't any reinforcing elements that emphasize his movement. Having mud or dirt spray from the bull's feet as he's charging, or adding subtle stylized "air lines" to the bull's horn or the bird's wings would really help with the sense of kinetic energy.

If you're curious, we wrote up a blog post what seems like ages ago about how we designed and implemented one of our big full screen effects for one of our previous titles, Color Sheep. That process had Eric flesh out all of the art and the timeline for what he wanted to have shown on screen. While it produced an awesome result and ensured that he got exactly the look he was going for, it also consumed a lot of his time. Moving forward with this project, I think Tom and I may have to try our hands at adding in a few particle effects (or at least the first passes).

Aside from that, news for us:

Tom and Eric are both largely in Kickstarter preparation mode, with Eric churning away on frames of animation for our Kickstarter video, and Tom prepping the actual Kickstarter page and capturing gameplay footage. I've spent the time I had this week wrapping up a first revision to our tutorial, which I hope paces and introduces the mechanics of our game in a more natural cadence and with a better sense of priority.

Cheers and have a good weekend everybody!

[TrinketBen]

It's been waaaaaaaaaaaaaay too long since out last update, but we have an excuse! We've spent the last 2ish weeks getting ready for the launch of our Kickstarter!

I'm really excited to get back in to the swing of updating this thread though, and our hope is to do some Twitch livestreams of development, both from the art perspective and from the design/tech perspective.

The Kickstarter period will definitely consume a lot of time, just as preparing for it has, but my hope is that either Tom or I can peel off and return to full time development.

Of note -- I updated the screenshots and .gifs on the first post of the thread with new, fully-colored shots. Eric and both of our colorists were working really hard to ensure that we had full-color footage for the Kickstarter launch.

Also really excited to work with Eric a little bit more on effects and polish now that Mina's animations are all colored in. In addition to being an all around illustration wizard, Eric has a knack for VFX style. Check out the blue glow on this Super Fire spell and these rad killing blow hit effects.

[LobsterSundew]

Good luck on Kickstarter. I've already backed it.

I like the pitcher plant monster because I have a Nepenthes sanguinea growing in the basement. It looks like the monster can start flying around after it catches something.

[Leon Fook]

Ohh god, just saw your kickstarter.
Looking good, post to follow. Hope you success with your kickstarter.

[_metamythical]

Excellent

[pottering]

whoa, very impressive

[dmitsuki]

Looks really good, can the artist cite any inspirations? Reminds me of You Yoshinari. The premise reminds me of Toriko, but in it's own very unique way.

[Panurge]

Awesome concept! Reminds me a little of 'The God of Cookery.' I'll definitely be backing this.

[Jondog]

Good luck with the kickstarter, those animations are sweet.

[grhufnagl]

Hi All,

We've had an amazing run so far and are now reaching for stretch goals for the PC/Mac/Linux release. We've focused a lot on great content to make the initial release impactful and are close to the first VO tier with an announcer pack.

In addition, I've put together a Game Audio overview video covering our sound design work thus far. Click the image below to view it. Thanks to all of you for the support thus far! We are super psyched about this and look forward to seeing how this all pans out. Cheers!