Lore in a Cooking Game: Why?
Also how, who, where, and … what the?
Hey Chefs! It’s me, Ryan.
I love it when fans talk about the lore in the Cook, Serve, Delicious! series. It’s a delight to see the confused and enthusiastic reactions of people discovering that this seemingly straightforward cooking game series takes place in a post-disaster future with a very rich past, especially because the lore was kind of unintentional.
How We Accidentally Rewrote History in CSD2
You see, Nick and I didn’t realize we were going to be crafting an alternate reality when we were hired to write a bunch of content for CSD2—and we didn’t really notice as it was happening, either. We were initially hired to write silly in-game emails, which were just jokes meant to lighten the player’s mood in between stressful levels. Other than the inherently fictional nature of the situations in these emails, there was nothing “deep lore” about them.
But then, later in development, David asked us to write food descriptions as well. The food descriptions were meant to be silly fictional stories of the origin of each food written like an encyclopedia entry. We’d throw in references to real historical world events and people—thinking it was nothing more than good fun to say that there was a pasta famine in 14th century Italy or that Queen Elizabeth II made macaroni and cheese famous by being photographed eating it during her 1957 trip to the United States. What we didn’t consciously realize was that we were literally writing the history of the world in the game, and it painted a picture of a world vastly different from our own—where seemingly every major historical event was somehow tied to food.
Adding the Post-Apocalypse Post-Launch
To our delight and surprise, people loved the “lore” (a word we literally never used or thought about during development) of the game and wanted to know even more about the game’s setting. Fortunately for fans, David was eager to add post-launch content to CSD2, and that included more writing.
It was around this time that David decided to tell us that the game was set in the future after a series of cataclysmic events and something called the Blue War. He also recovered several lost visual assets that would perfectly play into this setup—restaurant decorations of seemingly mundane objects preserved and presented in shadow boxes. We thought it would be fun if the items were given to the player at random intervals with a story detailing how historically significant they were in this post-apocalyptic world. A simple pair of shoes revealed the fate of Washington DC, a pink tee shirt hinted to a war that forever changed the world's demeanor, and a french horn warned not to remove from the shadow box lest you risk radiation poisoning.
Bringing the Background Story to the Foreground
I cannot overstate enough that we wrote all of the lore in CSD2 on a whim and with the thought that it would be completely isolated to that game. We didn’t even make any attempt to organize or track any of the lore other than to make sure that one writer’s jokes didn’t contradict another’s, and as I said previously, we weren’t even thinking of it as “lore” until we found that some fan(s) had meticulously noted every mentioned historical and current event in the game on a public wiki page.
Then David decided to make a threequel set in a food truck that would travel through the war-torn United States, so the background lore was no longer isolated or in the background. Suddenly, us writers had to take all the thoughtless jokes seriously. As mentioned in the March newsletter, this mostly meant we had to figure out what the war-torn United States actually was by going through all of our CSD2 writing. Fortunately, most of the CSD2 lore included historic events that would have no bearing on CSD3’s setting, so we could easily ignore most of that stuff. Once we identified what lore was actually relevant, it was much easier to take it and run a bit further.
Of course, now that we realized our actions had consequences, we were much more careful about what we wrote into the game. Fortunately, since CSD3 took place only a few years after CSD2, it made sense for there to not be any huge sweeping changes—we could get away with strengthening the existing lore with smaller details, tweaks, and references.
For example, when writing food descriptions, we tried to refer to existing lore whenever possible, such as explaining that the Hanami Festival has endured Japan sinking into the ocean in the Hanami Dango description. While plotting the route, we purposely had the player visit a state that we had established in CSD2 as a nuclear wasteland. Heck, some of the lore additions were still totally impromptu, like when Vana (Cleaver’s voice actress) ad-libbed the line “how else are they going to protect all that cheese?” during a scripted conversation about Wisconsin moating itself.
All in all, I’m glad we accidentally created what’s probably the richest and most needlessly complicated lore in a cooking game, because it let us really express a level of creativity and humor in CSD3 that we hadn’t even dreamed of while writing CSD2. We got to make weird offhand jokes about “the land of the dead,” challenge ourselves to get players emotionally invested in the lives of two wacky robots, and set ourselves up for even more potentially unique stories in future games, should there be any.
Next month, I think it will be fun to write about the themes of CSD3; or maybe about the decision and challenges of writing a genderless, sexless, fill-in-the-blank protagonist; or something more simple like CSD2 emails; or a deep dive into all the food descriptions; or maybe I’ll feature another developer like in last month’s newsletter. What do you think? Let us know on social media!
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May Discord Challenge
Our May community challenge is up and 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!