Battle Chef Brigade
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 OverviewOne 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 TeamTom 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
BackgroundWe’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 StyleOur 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.
TechOn 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 StateAs 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