Hi! Alex here, founder and lead designer for Dapper Penguin Studios. In March we were really stoked to be able to announce our new game Recipe for Disaster and I thought now would be the perfect time to introduce the game personally and answer a few questions that you may have about the project and its ambitions for the future.
We are keen to keep our community updated on progress throughout development so you can expect regular updates from the team here. Also if you haven’t joined already, please do come and say hi on our Discord and follow us over on Twitter.
Okay, let's get started!
Q: How did Recipe for Disaster come to light?
Prior to my work as a game designer I actually spent several years working as a waiter and cook. I even went to cooking school, studying 9 hours a day with the plan being to land a job at a Michelin star restaurant. Life didn’t quite work out as intended and I ended up getting into IT and game development, which took me all over to the world and to many well-known companies. After a while I felt I wanted to do things my way and in 2016 I founded Dapper Penguin Studios, releasing our first game Rise of Industry in 2019, shortly followed by its futuristic 2130 DLC. Recipe for Disaster was intended to be a cooldown project following ROI, but has since developed into a much more ambitious title.
I’m sure a few of you will be able to relate to this, but the years spent working in the food service industry were ‘eye-opening’ to say the least, and it got me thinking about how NPC employees are represented in traditional management and tycoon games. This ended up being the foundation for Recipe for Disaster’s design.
Q: How are employees handled in Recipe for Disaster?
Have you ever worked in a place where everyone just quietly gets on with their job without any kind of personality, ambition or conflict? Yeah me neither, and yet in almost all tycoon and management games, staff perform their roles with an unnatural, mechanical consistency.
We wanted to change that. In Recipe for Disaster you don't really know how your new hires will fit in with the rest of the team, how they'll behave next month or if their personality will change as a result of someone else's actions. The game’s focus is therefore on the social and human side of having a business: customers not always being right, employees fighting, suppliers not delivering what they should've, you know, the day-to-day things that happen in real life.
Q: Will each restaurant have its own personality?
All NPCs will have a great deal of individual personality, with a unique loadout of skills, strengths, weaknesses, ambitions, traits and quirks. Even at this early stage of development it's almost impossible to find two NPCs that are the same!
Aside from the staff that you hire, a huge part of making players feel connected to the game world is through restaurant customisation. We currently have a restaurant editor with many placeable objects, textures, walls, floors, and decor. We also spent a lot of time fine-tuning an in-depth recipe editor which allows you to recreate your favourite dishes and learn how recipes work in real life. It’s really fun and intuitive!
Q: What else do you have planned?
Even with everything that we have done so far we still have a huge amount of work to do! The biggest features that are planned include:
- Multiplayer - Up to 4 player competitive head to head.
- Employee relationships - As time goes by employees will develop affection and distaste for one another.
- Special VIP customers and health inspections - Timed events which will put pressure on the player.
- Roles and uniforms - Clear roles and responsibilities for individual employees.
- Disasters - Appliance breakdowns, staff accidents and mistakes.
- Modding Support - Players will be able to design their own events, customer types, objects and stages.
Of course we’ll go into more detail once we are ready to show.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this short intro to the game. In the coming weeks we’ll be sharing more information about incoming features and progress, but until then thanks for dropping by!
Alex Mochi
Founder & Lead Designer - Dapper Penguin Studios