Hi everyone,

Kane here! Once again, it's been a while since our last update on this page, but we have given bits and pieces of Chef Wanted content on other platforms in that span of time. In case you missed them, revealed the soundtrack album cover on Twitter here, and I also talked about Chef Wanted a fair bit in my "2019 Wrap-Up" which you can check out here. But you would be right in saying that it's been a few months since the last PROPER update, so here's one of those!

We're still trying to avoid spoiling any significant parts of the gameplay or story for Chef Wanted, so this update post won't be too big, but there are two things in particular that we'd like to show off.

Because Chef Wanted takes place mostly in the same kind of area, being a grey, underground storage facility, the environments originally looked very repetitive with no real themes or gimmicks going on. After Sian and I played through Luigi's Mansion 3, which had a similar concept as Chef Wanted in that you unlocked and traversed multiple floors of a single building, we decided to overhaul the visuals of our game so that each floor had something unique about them, making travelling a lot more interesting and memorable. Not only will certain landmarks make it easier to remember where you're going, as well as additional visuals to help with story, but the new look for the basement is much, MUCH better looking than its predecessor.

Though most of the floors are still in the planning/draft stage, Sian has finalised a small section of Floor -2 to show off, and to compare with the previous version:

As you can see, Floor -2 has a lot of plushies. This particular section of Floor -2 features stuffed animals, but the rest of Floor -2 has lots of other props as well, all with the general gimmick of "Merchandise", which is Floor -2's theme. We've added themes to all of the other floors as well, which will hopefully make them stand out more and be more fun to look at. I've also worked on a step-by-step "generator" for adding randomised grime under the walls, as well as some general colour optimisations, which you can see in this screenshot as well.

So that's a small update on the visual overhaul. It's worth mentioning that the floors in Chef Wanted get bigger and bigger as you go down. The final floor has a map that consists of, roughly, an 8x13 grid of "screens" (a screen's-worth of environment). Which is, you know, pretty massive. So Sian has a lot of work to do, and this process may take a while.

Emil and I are still working on what we can. Emil has integrated the full day "loop", so it's possible to complete a day and move onto the next one. This may seem simple in theory but the amount of data that needs to be calculated for this to work is more than you might think. I have been working on the floors with Sian but otherwise I have actually been working on a few side projects that aren't involved with Chef Wanted. I am, for the most part, finished with my side of the development, but I will always work on anything that pop up!

I have also released a new song onto the soundtrack, being Floor -2's theme. It's probably one of the weakest songs in the soundtrack admittedly, but I thought now was a good time to show it off since Sian has shown off a part of Floor -2's visuals!

And that's all we'd like to share for now! We have no real prediction for when this game comes out, but we're very much aware of how long it has taken so far. We'd... prefer to not think about it...

Thanks for reading!

~ Team EKS