The Game - The Concept - The Development Team
In creating His Excellency's Chef, we wanted to make a cooking game with a creative style. We wanted it to be grand, exciting, and tense.
In medieval history, we found the perfect setting. The multi-course medieval feast is an icon of extravagant cuisine, and preparing for one is an exciting premise for a game. It also makes for a somewhat educational setting. We want players to walk away from the game understanding more about medieval understandings of food.
These are the aims that guided the development of Chef from the beginning. To make the game more creatively-oriented, we've focused gameplay away from executing recipes precisely. Instead, Chef gives you a goal to achieve, resource and time constraints, and tools to achieve the goal.
We abstracted the physical act of cooking an ingredient to timers so we could focus on good feedback on the resulting dish rather than the process of making it. We introduced commandable underlings to emphasize the management challenges inherent in cooking for a lot of people. We based our flavor systems on historical notions of balance we learned from in our research.
With these ideas, we believe we've made an enjoyable, creative, historical cooking game.
- Jonathan K-Q, Creative Director
