March Newsletter: Driving a Food Truck Through a Post-Apocalyptic USA
Driving a Food Truck Through a Post-Apocalyptic USA
or: how we came up with the territories and plotted the route in CSD3
Cook, Serve, Delicious! 3?! breaks from the series’ tradition of setting the game in a single restaurant, building, and city, and instead puts you in a food truck on a cross-country road trip through a war-torn United States. Though this seems like an obvious game design decision in retrospect, it wasn’t always the case.
Starting the Engine
When David first pitched CSD3 to us writers, he had already decided that the game would start with the restaurant from CSD2 being blown up and the chef realizing that it would be smarter to stay on the move in a food truck than to start a third restaurant that could, ya know, go boom again. A food truck was actually teased at the end of the previous game, but a very small percent of players actually got that far due to the less-than-ideal difficulty curve. Behind the scenes, the decision to set CSD3 in a food truck was purely out of David’s desire to shake up the series and squeeze more fun out of the development process, which it totally did.
As pre-production discussions progressed, it was decided that the character should have a destination, and David especially thought it would be great to bring back Iron Cook from CSD1 as a contest at the end of the game. This meant that we had to plot an actual route through the post-apocalyptic USA for the player character to travel throughout the game.
Road Hazards Ahead
To make this a reality, the first course of action was to go through everything we had written in CSD2 to figure out the status of each US state … because we didn't really keep track of that when writing that game because we honestly thought those were all throwaway jokes that we wouldn’t be revisiting.
It turned out that, due to our odd sense of humor, five states had been left a nuclear wasteland, five states and the nation's capital had all fallen into the ocean or been abandoned due to rising waters, two had left the US to join Canada, and two had been walled or moated off from the rest of the nation. We knew early on that the truck would have to visit at least one of these affected locations to finally bring the background story to the foreground, but the details on that would come later.
Starting Location and Destination
We decided early on that the journey should end in the nation's new capital of Nashville, Tennessee since it was already established as a location of note in the CSD2 lore. One thing that hadn't been established in CSD2, however, was where that game actually took place. One of us thought it would be funny to reveal that the Teragon Supertower was in Boise and not somewhere more interesting or trendy, so Boise became the starting point of an epic video game journey.
Sightseeing
David also tasked us with picking the other nine cities for the player to visit on their way from Boise to Nashville. Fortunately, aside from knowing the general direction that the truck needed to travel, David provided us with short descriptions of what each location would look like, which would help to narrow down the options. For example, we had to find "a desert location with a small town," as well as "Oklahoma county that borders Texas w/military presence," and my personal favorite: "a standard city." Being that Nick, an Australian living in Canada, didn't possess an insider's knowledge of the topography and reputation of individual areas of the USA, I took point on suggesting cities and routes.
I opened a map and explored my options. The result was a mixture of matching the descriptions with similar areas as they exist in the real world and picking locations that fit or could be made to fit in the game's fictional setting. The route was drafted and finalized in a single night. It was also during this process that we decided to send the player into one of the states that had been established in CSD2 as a radioactive wasteland, which in turn would inform the writing of the story later (read more about that in last month’s newsletter here).
Greetings From…
Furthermore, we had to name the "territories" that these locations existed in. These were originally intended to be more of a focus in the game, as each would come with its own in-game description similar to the restaurant descriptions from CSD2, but the in-game descriptions were dropped before they were written and the territories ended up being mentioned more in the script than in the game itself. To name them, Nick and I simply split the list down the middle and leaned hard on the irony, such as "Drydock Harbor" for a thriving transit city. I also managed to sneak a Blade Runner reference into the series yet again by naming one territory "Tyrell County."
As a fun fact, it’s during this phase of development that I realized how many people have never heard the word “halcyon” spoken aloud. Also, “Metro Central” was intended as a subtle nod to the title of the Australian television show that Nick had recently helped create, write, and edit.
And that’s how we developed the cross-country road trip in CSD3! It was a blast to do something so creative and collaborative for a cooking game, especially since our efforts wouldn’t be missed by a majority of players like was the case with parts of CSD2.
I’m working on a surprise for next month’s newsletter that will be unlike (but not totally dissimilar to) the first three from this year in a very exciting way! Fingers crossed that it works out! In the meantime, follow us on social media (see below) and be sure to tell all of your friends about how incredibly awesome Ryan is at writing these newsletters that go unnecessarily deep into the development of Cook, Serve, Delicious!
Twitter - Instagram - Reddit - Discord - YouTube - Facebook
March Discord Challenge
Our March community challenge is running on the CSD Discord — post your entry for a chance to win great prizes like game codes, the iconic Sundae plushie, or replicas of CSD3's in-game gold and bronze medals!