Recipe for a game: We chat to Ghost Town Games about Overcooked
We’ve long banged the drum about Overcooked, a indie game developed by Ghost Town Games and published by Team17, and while you can run off to read our review, and even check out my mum and I playing the game (she’s a Cook), you might be interested to hear that the developer is just two people, Oli and Phil, that latter of whom I got to speak to at E3 when I first managed to get hands on with the game.
After five years at Frontier Developments, making such titles as Kinectimals and Zoo Tycoon, Phil and Oli struck out on their own, and there was a lot of learning to do, it seems. “The hardest part was just the sheer amount of learning we had to do as we developed the game. As a two man studio you have to wear a lot of hats, you can’t just be an artist on a game you have to be an animator, a rigger, a UI artist, a shader programmer, Admin, marketing, QA etc. etc. So with the majority of tasks you have to teach yourself the discipline in some small way as you go along. Don’t get me wrong we’re by no means experts in most of these fields, but we’re definitely a lot better now than when we started! The game took just over a year to make, it was built in Unity by myself and Oli De-Vine from my living room living on a diet of tea and biscuits.”
Indeed, it must be particularly hard being a dev-team that’s is two people strong? “It’s fantastic, I really love it. Having worked in teams of varying sizes over the years I can honestly say I much prefer working with smaller teams. Not only do you get to be involved in much more of the development process of the game, you can also make decisions more quickly, you can communicate much more easily and generally keep the direction of the game focused. There are definitely days where I wish there was say… an animation department to swoop in a make everything look pretty without us having to lift a finger, but the pros definitely out weighed the cons on this project.”
With games like Cooking Mama once being so popular, these days cooking games aren’t really something we talk about very often. Where did the inspiration come from? “We knew we wanted to make a co-operative game from the start, and we knew we wanted to make a game which focused on a team’s ability to work together. A lot of co-op games are either single player games with a second player tacked on, or they’re co-op games which actually drive players to compete in someways (rushing to get to the next enemy or racing to try and hoover up loot), we wanted to make a game where it was more important that your team communicated and coordinated their actions to come out on top. Having working in kitchens when I was younger it seemed like a really obvious fit, where else do you have a team of people all working together, all communicating (usually via shouting) in order to achieve a common goal, all against the clock.”
So Phil worked in a kitchen, then. What was his favourite thing to cook? “Tough one… I like to think I make pretty good pancakes, I’ve spent a lot of time trying to perfect my recipe, the key is definitely to whisk the egg whites separately and fold them into the batter, it’s a bit more work but… mmm… now I want pancakes.”
Back to the game, and the co-op, then, because that is having something of a resurgence. What does Phil put that down to? “I don’t really know is the honest answer, I think there’s probably a lot of gamers out there who live in households of more than 1 person who want to share their gaming experience with their families/housemates rather than taking up the whole TV for an evening. I think it’s just a really nice way to socialise and to share you hobby with those closest to you.Certainly most of my fondest gaming moments have been with friends all gathered around a TV playing bomberman or mario kart or what-have-you.”
Having played Overcooked, and found it better in co-op, but still fun solo, how do Ghost Town Games strike that balance? “We actually spent a lot of time prototyping various different approaches to the single player game, at one point it was almost a puzzle game which involved sending food on conveyors belts and navigating a maze to pick them up on the other end. We hit upon the idea of allowing player’s to switch between two chefs and realised that if we increased the timers for things like chopping/ doing the washing up, players could actually queue up their actions and enjoy a game of spinning-plates as they switched between the various tasks.”
I’m particularly keen on the music, so who composed that and what were the ideas behind it? “We got some great music from our friends who have a music production company called GoodKill Music. They are a really talented and were really excellent to work with, really hoping we get to work with them again!” Incidentally, there’s a bit of the music that plays when you’re driving the bus that sounds an awful lot like Light of the Seven from the last episode of Game of Thrones Season Six. Was that deliberate? “Happy coincidence, but I love the idea of hidden Game of Thrones Easter eggs throughout the game!”.
