Opening
Hello everybody and welcome back to another episode of Retro Release – The Game Development Podcast, where each week we go through the development and release of some of gamings most notable titles.
I’m your host Will, and as always I’m joined by my co-host Michael.
This week I wanted to take look at another indie game, a relatively recent one which focuses heavily on intense co-op gameplay and… kitchens? Well, that’s the best way I can describe Overcooked. If you’ve played it you know exactly why I picked this game. If you haven’t, well I’ll just say, Overcooked is one of the most high energy games out there, and nowhere near as therapeutic as real cooking.
With that said, let’s just get on with it!
Intro
Overcooked was developed by Ghost Town Games and Published by Team17. Phil Duncan and Oli De-vine founded GTG after leaving Frontier Developments, and we’ll be hearing from them throughout this episode. A lot of the story behind Overcooked comes from their own websites blog, which I highly encourage you to check out!
Before we go any further though, delving into the humble origins of this kitchen nightmare, I wanted to read out the description on the games press page. Mainly because I don’t think any game has ever encapsulated itself so well:
“Overcooked is a chaotic co-operative cooking game for 1-4 players. Working together these brave chefs must prepare, cook and serve up each order before the baying customers storm out in a rage. As the tension mounts more and more obstacles will stand in your way: from fire and rats to fireballs, The Great and Malevolent Ever-Peckish and much much more. Your culinary adventure will take you to increasingly bizarre and exotic locations, forcing you to scream and argue your way through a perilous gourmet gauntlet. Only a well-oiled team will come out on top, proving once and for all that if you can’t stand the heat, you should get out the kitchen!”
Back to the boys involved. Phil and Oli left Frontier because they wanted to take a risk, make something interesting, and have creative freedom. They set up shop in Cambridge, England. In their blog Phil has said:
“Ghost Town Games is based in Cambridge in the UK. What most people don’t realise is that Cambridge is home to a raft of different independent developers all beavering quietly away on their various trendy indie projects. When we started working on Overcooked we were keen to meet as many of these developers as possible, not just because we wanted to eat their brains to gain their knowledge but because a sense of community was something we felt was necessary to keep a hold of.”
From what else Phil says in this post, titled ‘Fighting Dinosaurs’, it seems he and Oli learned a lot from just talking to other indie devs. They felt as though they were part of a community. One that welcomed and helped anyone wanting to get involved.
With all this knowledge it seems fitting to finally dive into how Ghost Town Games actually made Overcooked. We know what the game is and where it came from, all that’s left is to look at how the Kitchen Carnage was created.
Conceptualisation and Development
This weeks episode is going to be split into 4 segments, the cooking, the co-operation, the cutting, and the conventions. Each is a key aspect to how Overcooked was created. And it all comes from Oli and Phil directly in blogs and interviews.
The Cooking
So, why a Kitchen? Well when you’re basing a game around the idea of co-operation (which we’ll get back too) what better place to think of than a bustling restaurant? Phil, in one of his blog posts, mentions how during development his girlfriend took him to a 2 star Michelin restaurant in West London, and they got to have a little peak into the Kitchen.
There were 20 odd people working in a small space, all shouting, giving orders, and doing their best to put out the best meals possible. He couldn’t help but realise that the game he was making emulated this so well. He puts it best himself:
“Anyone who has ever (successfully) cooked a meal for a group of their friends or family should be able to tell you why they do it. When you’re done sweating over the stove, when you’ve served up each plateful and you’ve finished apologising for the state of the peas, there’s a wonderful sense of fulfillment that comes from sharing your creation with others. Watching their worldly woes fall away, at least for a moment, as they tuck into the bountiful spread you’ve laid before them.”
The key word here is fulfilment. Overcooked is not an easy game, having to juggle all the roles mentioned above between multiple people is nothing short of anxiety inducing. But when you’ve served your last dish, it all seems worth it. It also doesn’t hurt that cooking is something everyone can relate to.
The Co-operation
Cooking isn’t always easy, so imagine you have to keep cooking for many people, and you have to do it in a group. Well Phil and Oli saw this as the perfect way to make a co-op experience. They then created Overcooked’s core design idea as a response to the industry. In a Gamasutra interview Phil says that most of the industry uses co-op as an afterthought. You could play most of these games on your own, as many do, they aren’t built around co-operation. They feature it to sell more copies.
Phil then told Gamasutra that most co-op games are about different skills, and choosing classes with different roles. Not many are actually built around co-operation and communication. He saw a kitchen as a way to incentive that type of gameplay:
“I’ve worked in various restaurants over the years, earned my stripes pot washing and bussing tables, and kitchens have always struck me as a perfect analogy for a cooperative game: an occupation where teamwork, time management, spatial awareness and shouting are all vitally important :)”
All of those ideas would become core tenants of Overcooked. In making the controls deceptively simple they could facilitate actions easily. Pick up, put down, and chop. They then had to teach the player how with another person this can be more easily achieved. The best way I can explain this is with a counter.
In their prototypes and early levels the levels are split up by a long counter. Walking around them wastes time, so the idea they want you to pick up on is if you put your item down, have someone prep it and make sure its ready to serve there, everything is quicker.
What Phil and Oli really wanted to avoid is something they mention in their blog – First to Fun. This being in co-op games when you all rush to collect the loot and it becomes a race. All that teamwork goes out of the window. Think getting the princess in Castle Crashers, except there it’s done on purpose.
So GTG stripped away any type of reward that doesn’t incentivise co-operation, and fed that into the gameplay. But they realised that can have its own slew of problems.
What GTG realised was that players could quite easily fall into a routine, each having assigned roles they take through a level. This was great! What they were attempting to convey was being picked up on. But then the game became too samey, where was the difference? Where was the challenge?
To address this they came up with 3 linked solutions:
- more roles than players
- Delays
- Disruptions
These worked in tandem to create an atmosphere that was ever changing. If you have more roles than people, that requires constant role switching, delays mean that other tasks can be completed in the meantime, and disruptions – well they just make things interesting.
The disruptions created chaos, chaos that could only be navigated by communication. All three of the above tenants require communication, but if every level has a different and wacky disruption, the entire team is constantly thinking on their feet. It creates a constant need to communicate, even if the group have everything else down to a tee.
The Cutting
Overcooked, on the surface, looks like a simple game, you cook a meal and serve it. Just because things can be simple doesn’t mean they can’t be effective! Although there were a slew of more ideas for this game.
Phil has talked about how when making a game you can have loads of great ideas, but because you’re making a product, and you have deadlines, you can’t always get it all in.
He says there’s two ways this can go, for the most part:
- You go back to your estimates. You eye up the numbers next to each features and gently massage them until they more comfortably fit within the boundaries of your lovely schedule (don’t worry producer friends you can reformat it all later)
- You prioritise all your lovely ideas from Absolutely Essential to Wouldn’t It Be Nice If, and you accept the grim fact that those features on the bottom of the list probably won’t make it into the final game. (You can also make yourself feel better by accepting that the end user probably won’t have been aware those features ever existed anyway… unless you already included them in your kickstarter pitch… :-S)
To Phil you end up with option 2 most of the time, and Overcooked was no exception. He understands that a game comes down to its ‘pillar ideas’ – the ones you use to sell it. Whats that for Overcooked? Cooking and Co-operation of course!
The Conventions
Something we’ve never really touched on in this podcast, mainly because we don’t talk about indie games all that much, is the convention circuit. Now what does that mean? Well its actually quite simple. Most of the time when developing a game, small indie devs will go around to different gaming conventions and events showcasing early builds of their games. Hopefully not with the eyes of the press on them at this point.
Overcooked and Phil and Oli were no exception. They went to many of these types of events, and what did they learn? Well that during the early days of development, their game wasn’t finished. They even said they preferred being told that something they’d worked a couple of months on didn’t work, as they could fix it, rather than learn years of work is just shit.
They could comfortably go back to the drawing board and improve Overcooked.
In their blog Phil also talks about their second convention experience saying:
“We’re back from Blackpool after our second successful public showing and we’re brimming with new ideas, features and a few new bugs to fix too!”
Although the most interesting part actually comes from players themselves. Phil talks about how GTG would tell people the basics and put them in three levels, a salad level, a soup level, and one that brings it all together.
Sometimes the strangers playing wouldn’t talk, but he notes how a lot of the time what would start as mumbles in the first level would devolve (or evolve depending on how you look at it) into screaming and shouting – typical co-op gaming to be honest.
Politeness would turn into, and these are Phil’s words not mine:
“Where’s the lettuce for this burger?”
“Someone wash me up a plate!”
“WHERE’S THE F****ING FIRE EXTINGUISHER?!!”
When talking to gamesindustry.biz both Oli and Phil talk about the further benefits of the convention circuit. As Oli says:
“Strangers tell you the problems, when you play with developers they try to give you solutions… they don’t really tell you the problem that they’re trying to solve. It can be quite annoying.”
So at least in GTG’s experience you need both devs and strangers to complete a puzzle, one that gives you a problem, and the means to fix it.
They talk about, in their BAFTA video, how a little girl who must’ve been 6-7 years old started playing the game, and they were unsure if she’d manage it. Because they’d built a game for themselves, not someone with no experience. But the visual design, simple controls, and concept of cooking meant she picked up really easily. So they knew they were doing something right, and ran with it.
It’s here that the game starts to get off there ground, GTG were contacting publishers, such as Team17. But at the time Team17 couldn’t take them on, until around 2 months before launch. The pair say that Phil was then on a plane and headed towards E3.
Interestingly. Overcooked was placed right next to Yooka-Laylee at E3 (they’re both Team17 games after all). This was a nice surprise though, because a lot of people who came to see Yooka-Laylee would see Overcooked. Meaning it would be talked about by more journalist outlets:
“People went to see Yooka-Laylee and we were like: ‘Oh hello, have you seen this marvellous cooking game?’ Of course, they hadn’t”
There’s also a crazy story about their time at E3 that warrants mention before we move on. Whilst Phil was in the US and Oli in the UK, they got their ESRB (US games rating board) rating back. Everything was green, making it ‘E for everyone’. Apart from ONE thing – partial nudity.
What?!? It was a bum, yep, a bum. The logo, and some of the promo material, has a naked bum on it, and to the ESRB, that meant another 10 or so years on the rating for the game. So Oli in the Uk was scrambling before they went over to the US to make sure the rating could remain the same. Which meant removing some bums.
Release and Post-Release
How well was Overcooked received? Well I think the BAFTA’s for British game and Family Game speak for themselves to be honest. Although the main thing critics latched onto was the dynamics of the co-op gameplay. The exact thing Phil and Oli were going for, verbal communication, was seen and applauded.
Phil had this to say:
“Overcooked came home with the BAFTAs for Best British Game and Best Family Game and we cannot say thank you enough. Truly, without you guys none of this could have happened. We’re your greatest fans.”
How humble ay?
‘A return to couch co-op’ was a phrase thrown around a lot at the time, which makes sense. What doest make too much sense is how many criticised the single player, calling it repetitive and boring. I don’t think that a fair, as whilst you can play alone, the entire game is built around the opposite. You lose all the interaction and communication outside of the game if you play alone.
Hardcore Gamer called Overcooked underdone, lambasting the star reward system as something akin to mobile games, and saying that unless you have patience this isn’t the game for you. Although I think with a site name like ‘hardcore gamer’ they were never going to enjoy Overcooked. Which is a shame. Because it was never about complex mechanics or a deep single player experience. Overcooked was always, from the get go, m designed around sitting down on a couch with some friends and screaming your heads off.
Yes you do need the correct environment of a group and not an individual, but not every single game needs to be as broad as humanely possible. Put through a meat grinder to come out as something that any individual can play. Overcooked requires a kitchens worth of people, and that isn’t a bad thing.
On a lighter note, Overcooked did so well that it warranted extra DLC in levels and characters, and even a sequel.
Outro
Thanks to everyone for listening to another episode of the Retro Release podcast! We appreciate all your support. If you want to contact us you can either follow us @retroreleasepod on twitter or email us at retroreleasepod@gmail.com. We also have a WordPress with all the scripts and sources on it! That’ll be linked in the episode description. We’re on essentially every platform so please don’t forget to tell your mates or give us a review – you can do it right in app on iTunes, at the bottom of our show page!
Thanks guys, we’ll see you next week.
Sources
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overcooked
https://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/290885
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