Hello, aspiring chefs! Development is currently in high gear but I wanted to take a moment to touch base, start digging into some features, and share progress.
In today’s post we are going to take our first look at perhaps the most vital component of any successful restaurant: its employees. In Recipe for Disaster you will have full control over who you hire and fire. All aspects of an individual employee, from their appearance to their skills and personality, are procedurally generated which means that every team will be unique.
Employee skills
When deciding who to hire the first thing that you’re going to want to look at are an individual’s skills. All skills range from levels 1 - 5 and, right now, can be broadly broken down into two categories: cooking skills and non-cooking skills (more skills may be added as we continue development).
Cooking skills
These relate to one of the five main kitchen appliances; the countertop, fryer, grill, oven, and stove. The higher the skill level, the greater the probability of a boost to the food quality of a dish that utilises the associated appliance. Be careful though as conversely, the lower the level, the greater the chance that a dish will receive a negative modifier e.g. Burnt!
Non-cooking skills
The charisma skill level affects how successfully an employee is at boosting the mood/attitude of colleagues and customers when things start to go south. The serving skill relates to an employee’s ability to deliver good customer service and directly affects how customers perceive service quality. Carrying determines the likelihood of an employee dropping ingredients and dishes during preparation and service, whilst the cleaning skill affects the efficiency and thoroughness of cleaning actions throughout the restaurant.
Loved and hated skills
On top of all this, every employee will have one loved skill and one hated skill.
When employees perform actions that utilise a loved or hated skill they will receive either a positive boost or negative hit to their mood/attitude level. This is important because if you don’t look after your employees welfare there will be consequences!
I know I’ve hinted at a number of other mechanics that link up with employee skills, and I’ll be going over all of them in future posts, but hopefully this is enough to get started for now.
Updates: 3D models, appliance lighting FX, and soundtrack preview
We’ve just started adding 3D models that will appear when employees use appliances. The pans below are linked to the stove specifically but each appliance will have its own set of models. Anyone for surf and turf?
Speaking of appliances we’re currently working on lighting FX to make the kitchen look and feel really intense. Check out the warm glow of the oven.
Finally, I think we can all agree that music plays a huge part in defining the atmosphere and mood of a game, so have a listen HERE to a quick preview of one of the ambient tracks that plays during service to get an idea of what we are aiming for...
Thanks for stopping by and feel free to join our Discord and follow us on Twitter, the support is greatly appreciated. We’ll be back with another update soon.
Alex Mochi
Founder and lead designer - Dapper Penguin Studios