Hello burger connoisseurs,
Whilst any meal can stand on its own, this burger truck is at its best with a side of Fry. Continuing our behind the scenes series, let’s take a look at your partner in food-crimes!
When Patty accidentally, uh, ‘acquired’ the business, it came with a few things: a worn but trusty truck, a much maligned reputation, and a resident cook named Fry.
Fry’s been with this food truck for a while, but its failings were despite his best efforts - not because of them. You can be an excellent cook and still dish up disasters if your boss is as bad at flavor design as the last guy was.
Fry has a feeling that things will be different with Patty in charge, though! Despite meeting five minutes ago, it feels like they’ve been in sync for years.
This man is here to chill with the grill.
What Patty lacks in chill, Fry more than makes up for. Astoundingly aloof, Fry is unflinching over a vat of boiling oil or a piping hot grill. Is that just his natural demeanor, or a questionable pattern of self-medication? Who’s to say?
Fry is a love letter to some of our favourite definitely-not-stoner characters of children's cartoons, such as Shaggy from Scooby Doo, Trent from Daria, Greg from the Steven Universe, and lowkey Crush from Finding Nemo.
Like some of these characters, Fry is more than just a chill bro, although he’s definitely also that. He’s quietly the brains of the operation - helping Patty work through difficult situations with an impressively level head, and managing the many moving parts of the Burger Bois kitchen with nary a complaint.
As we mentioned in the last update (read it here!), visually we wanted Patty & Fry to represent their namesakes. But fried potato comes in lots of shapes and sizes - crinkle cut, wedges, shoestring, steak cut… which meant that our early Fry concepts explored a bunch of different body shapes!
A broad exploration like this tends to reveal things you hadn’t known yourself about the character! We quickly realised that he needed to be tall, to contrast Patty. That he had a bit of a lazy grin, like the second concept. That he was definitely a slouchy, comfy dresser like the third concept… but he was absolutely NOT a bishounen like that. And of all the concepts, we loved how the crinkle cut fries haircut immediately connected with the fries he’s named for. The next step was to refine these ideas into the same guy.
We explored a few different outfits for him, but the jeans & hoodie version stood out to us as what this laidback guy would be happiest wearing whilst working. The checkered flannel and round sunnies were a close contender, but it felt more like his idea of dressing up for a special occasion to us.
One of our visual design inspirations was Mr Fryman from Steven Universe. We adored how silly his shoestring fries hair was, and part of our brief to artist Jackal was to explore our own version of it, which we think they’ve nailed!
We did end up crinkling the cut of the hair a bit further during the final stage. As shown by the comparison above, we realised it could be misinterpreted as dreadlocks, which it’s not meant to be!
Which might have you wondering: “what is the deal with his hair? Is it made of fries? Are fries growing from his head? Has he just styled it to look like fries?”
And you’re welcome to wonder. :)
We’re really enjoying doing these lil game-dev process explorations! Next time we’ll be back to yap about The Truck - but what else would you like to hear about? Reply in the comments here, or @ us on socials to let us know!
Until next time,
Jess, Alex, Jackal & Anthony