When I was making Cook, Serve, Delicious! I wanted to make sure it had a great soundtrack. Music is one of the most important elements in a game, but the problem was, I didn't have quite enough money to be able to create an entire original soundtrack. Jonathan Geer (composer of the entire CSD series) and I had previously worked on several games before CSD, and we worked out a deal where I could have a soundtrack made at a nice discount as long as that music went royalty free a few months after launch. I figured that would be ok- what are the odds that would even be an issue?
Well, I still get to this day emails from people hearing CSD music in commercials, web shows, movies, just about everything you can think of that needs some catchy, fun music. My personal favorite is the Subway Halloween commercial.
The music that has spanned the series has turned up in so many unique places, my personal favorite being this recent performance by the NOTUS Vocal Ensemble singing "Chakalaka" from Cook, Serve, Delicious! 3?!
This is so surreal in the best possible way!
You can listen to this, as well as songs from other amazing games like Abzu and Celeste, right here!
Indiana NOTUS Contemporary Vocal Ensemble Performance!
No Celebration Without Music
For me, Re-Mustard is a celebration of the entire series as a whole by remaking the game that started it all. To that end you're going to be getting the highest quality versions of the original CSD soundtrack that have ever been heard in the series so far. It's a bit nuts hearing the main CSD theme compared to the original and how much quality was lost in the original version of the game (mainly due to compression and the tools available at the time).
But I did want this game to be special, and after talking with Jonathan Geer, he is graciously allowing us to present, for the first time ever, the ENTIRE catalog of CSD soundtracks in one game. That is nearly 200 tracks from Cook, Serve, Delicious 1, 2, and 3, as well as Cook Serve Forever, available in a playlist format for you to customize however you'd like!
Right now the plan is to have a basic level of customization by splitting each game into three playlists: relaxed (the menu music), cookin' (standard gameplay) and sizzlin' (rush hour tracks). You can place these playlists anywhere within a standard gameplay day split into five sections (morning, lunch rush hour, afternoon, dinner rush hour, evening). So if you want to start the day with some CSD 3 tracks, listen to some frantic CSD 2/CSD 1 tracks during morning rush hours, and end the day with some chill Cook Serve Forever tracks, you can do just that!
My ultimate goal is to have an advanced editor so that you can have complete control over what tracks you want shuffled into the day- it's going to be a large endeavor as you might imagine but I think we can pull it off.
Workin' Workin' Workin'
For these next two months we'll be full steam ahead in finishing Cook Serve Forever and bringing it to consoles and v1.0 for PC, and after that we're 100% focused on Re-Mustard! I'm already doing design plans and we've made some good headway into the art and feel of the game, and next time I'll be sharing what I'm planning for the modes and features.
As always I'd love any feedback, so feel free to leave some comments here or over on our Discord! Until the next dev update in May, take care and keep cookin' deliciously!
-David