Juicy July
over 7 years ago – Mon, Jul 31, 2017 at 04:34:02 PM

Hey there Battle Chefs! As July wraps up, it's time for an update. We've officially entered the scary part of development where parts of the game get locked down and big decisions get made! It's exciting and frightening to know that we can't change parts of the game without incurring a big penalty in terms of voice over re-recording and translator time. Let's check out what we've been working on!

BCB Veterans and Items

One of our highest reward tiers was for Eric to draw customer portraits to be displayed in-game. Eric's spent a lot of time over the last couple weeks on these and we're thrilled with how they've turned out! Here are a couple examples:

At a lower tier were the Backer Items, which we've integrated with temp art. There are excellent surprises awaiting you inside each of these!

Thrash's moveset

Thrash has been waiting for us to finish his move list, so I finally got around to stubbing them in. Check out his Heavy Attack that smacks monsters around the scene, damaging whatever they hit.

 Thrash's upgrade items were also all finalized, including homing fireballs!

 Polish and Bugs and Story

As we finalize segments of the story for Voice Over and Localization, there's less to share due to spoilers. Here are a bunch of the tidbits that are under wraps!

• Voice over recording starts this week! We've been directing each character's exact sound before the sessions and it's unbelievably exciting. We're planning on voicing WAY more of the game than we initially planned based on the stretch goal, but it's going to be so worth it!
• We found some spots in the story that needed more work, so Megan is busy healing our mistakes. We're so proud of this tale and can't wait for you to interact with all these characters.
• Load times and framerate optimizations got some attention this month. We want BCB to run very well on even older computers and were able to make big gains in this area. Ben's testing out some larger architectural changes that might result in further drastic improvements.
• Tom Dunkin mastered all the music over the last couple months, resulting in some great songs! He was even able to add some live recordings into the mixes, which has really helped them shine.
• In between Voice Over scheduling and script reviews, George found time to revisit the Forest Monsters' sound effects. They were the first to be created and now fit in with the more recent work in terms of quality and variation.

 Bit Bash

For those of you in Chicago or the Midwest, come to Bit Bash! Battle Chef Brigade will be on display, so stop by and do a little cooking. Bit Bash is always a great time and there are a ton of indie games to play!

That's all for this month, Battle Chefs! Looking forward to some big things in the coming months. Stay tuned!

Thrashing at Full Power
over 7 years ago – Fri, Jun 30, 2017 at 05:18:01 PM

Hey Battle Chefs! June has been a great month, filled with tons of secret story and gorgeous art!

Thrash

Our big focus for the last few weeks has been Battle Chef Brigade's most charming father, Thrash.

Thrash's campaign takes him on an emotional roller-coaster, so Eric has been hard at work making a mix-and-match pose system. Here are a few of the many possibilities.

Thrash's story doesn't just overlap with Mina's journey into the Brigade. As such, we've designed a certain cast of characters that play a very big role in his story.

Thrash visits some special combat levels, so we had to do some testing to make sure his unique jump height was accounted for.

 E3

While we kept working, our Adult Swim Games counterparts showed BCB at E3! They demo'd the game and trailers off at the Indie Mix, on the Geoff Keighley livestream, and on the late-night Twitch stream. The chat comments were very positive, which was a wonderful surprise.

 Mina campaign polish

Now that Megan is brilliantly reining in the story, Eric has had time to round off a few rough edges in Mina's campaign, especially where important poses were simply missing or not up to par.

 Real Fantasy Food

Victoria over at Pixelated Provisions has struck again, this time with Braised Dragon Belly!

 

That's all for this month, Battle Chefs!

May Flowers
over 7 years ago – Wed, May 31, 2017 at 07:54:31 PM

Hello Battle Chefs! May was a wild month for us. We did some intensive planning and playtesting with Adult Swim Games down in Atlanta, got Mina's story almost entirely complete, and named all the monsters!

Adult Swim Games Visit

ASG invited us down to Atlanta to tackle BCB's schedule, including marketing. That alone was super helpful, but they also brought in strangers from Cartoon Network to play part of the game, answer surveys, and then have a discussion about the game. We were surprised at how helpful that format was. Most of our playtest feedback so far has come from ourselves, friends, and convention attendees. The moderated discussion after a playtest ended up sussing out some really important issues that we've now fixed!

We also hooked up with the wonderful folks over at Battle & Brew for some lengthy playtests. A few players found some really excellent bugs :)

Finalizing Mina's campaign

We're itching to start voiceover recording for Mina's campaign, so we've been playing and finalizing everything we can. That's not an easy task when the game is so long! One area we worked on was the difficulty ramp. Balancing the player's understanding of the mechanics, the skill of the AI opponents, the number of judges, and the player's loadout takes a lot of iteration. Here's one of the per-duel AI score graphs before tweaking. Whoops!

Eric also breathed more life into the characters with some new outfits, including Kamin's stunning Duel costumes and concepts for Battle Chefs in the Brigade.

We also added a few nighttime scenes in Brigade Town, which was a really fun challenge. We didn't really want to recolor the entire town, so we ended up using a variety of tricks, including dark vertical vignettes, different deep blue tints on the characters and environment, fireflies, and a few additive "light" blobs.

 Monster names

We've finally named all the monsters, thanks to Megan! For example, the lazily named PlantBug, StealBird, and Bull are now the Caranha, Cheepchi, and Baurun! This led to the next hurdle: ensuring that players know what they're hunting when Kamin presents Baurun as the Theme Monster. And so, a new screen was born:

Audio

The Caverns biome has drawn the attention of George this month. The Goblins on their minecarts got some extra special love:

 Mining has never been so much fun!

Savage: Road to Darkness Shout-out

Some of our pals just launched a Kickstarter with some gorgeous similarities to BCB. If you love hand-drawn animation and platformers, check out Savage: Road to Darkness!

 

 That's all for this month, Battle Chefs! Save room for dessert :)

Custom Cookware
over 7 years ago – Fri, Apr 28, 2017 at 07:46:37 PM

Hi Battle Chefs! April flew by, but we still got a ton done. Let's take a look!

Items and Upgrades and Cookware

The amazing Juby tackled the remaining list of items. Here are a few that you'll come across in-game, either as gifts from characters or purchases in the store. Filling out your loadout is finally colorful, beautiful, and full of interesting combinations to try!

UI

The ultra-precise Benn Marion is almost finished overhauling the user interface. These are the latest screens to get a new coat of shiny paint:

 Writing and Judges

Megan has breathed life into so many characters through her writing. The word count in the game has increased 50% since she started. Her first tasks centered around the Duel presentations, especially Kamin and the Judges. They now each have their own personality, expressed through customized exclamations of joy and disgust. Belchior and Thorn, in their Brigade uniforms, are ready to taste some dishes during a neat story moment.

Optimizations and Linux

In behind-the-scenes news, we got a certain console running at an almost solid 60fps, which was an important goal for us. Previously it had been limping along, sometimes dipping down to 20 frames per second. There's certainly more work to do, but we're excited that these performance optimizations will improve the BCB experience for everyone across all platforms.

In that vein, we slipped in some preliminary Linux testing thanks to encouragement from some of you, especially Cheeseness. All looked good in those tests, thankfully :)

Credits

I recently spent some free time implementing the Credits screens. I love seeing controllable credits in other games, so I made sure to add it here. Thanks to the sheer number of you backers, the simple task of displaying your names turned out to be an interesting challenge! Here's an editor view of the solution.

That's enough for now, Battle Chefs! Thanks for tuning in and see you next time :)

March Munching
over 7 years ago – Fri, Mar 31, 2017 at 08:40:53 PM

Hey Battle Chefs! This month whirled by thanks to PAX East and a ton of playtest-driven improvements.

PAX

PAX went extremely smoothly thanks to Adult Swim Games. They QA'd the demo build extensively before the convention, which meant we got to interact with fans instead of fixing the build on the show floor. Our publisher also handled all the booth setup, which was a dream come true. We couldn't be more pleased with how well Trinket and Adult Swim Games are getting along.

BCB garnered some very nice articles at PAX, including this one from gamesradar. Tons of great quotes in there, but I particularly love how often we heard variations of this:

The puzzle mechanic is surprisingly evocative of the feeling you get while cooking a new meal - specifically, that little thrill of the "ah ha!" moment where you realize this would be perfect with some oregano tossed in. As time ticks down you find new ways to squeeze in that last ounce of flavor that you know will impress the judge, and the game makes you feel brilliant for it.

A Sprinkle of polish

Tom and Eric spent a little time on a few polish tasks that help bring the world and characters to life.

Promo art

As you may have noticed, the BCB Steam page was a little lacking. All of the capsules were made by me, very quickly, right before the Backer demo. Eric spent some time on new main promo image that can also be reused for the website and trailers!

Map

Kevin Hong recently finished the in-game map that we use when the chefs travel. Along with his establishing shots, the map helps a great deal by connecting and grounding the different scenes in the story.

Chapters

BCB finally has a Chapter Screen to help you track your progress through each campaign!

Dialogue of all sorts

The ever-growing amount of dialogue in the game has presented a problem, especially since we've started the process of integrating voice acting. For now, it's all temporary test voice-over from George, but we've begun selecting actors!

To help with all the writing, we've added the phenomenal Megan Fausti to the team! She's already wowed us with her ability to understand the BCB characters. Currently, she's working on making the Cooking Duel presentations more interesting and exciting.

We've also had to make a tool to manage all the different conversations and writing in the game. Here, I'm filtering the dialogues to see just the ones where Mina is in a conversation on a certain day. This has been invaluable for exporting localization and voice over lines as well! Excuse my poorly-drawn redaction blob - didn't want to spoil any of the story!

Until next time, Battle Chefs!