Cook, Serve, Delicious! Emails?!
You Have 770 In-Game Spam Emails
How and Why Did We Write All of Those?!
Hello chefs! It’s me again, Ryan.
This year I’ve been covering a lot about topics related to the third installment of the Cook, Serve, Delicious! series, but there was something missing from CSD3 that was previously a popular part of the franchise—in-game emails. How did the emails come to be a part of CSD? How were they written? Why were they absent from CSD3? Read on to learn all this and more!
A Break From the Stress
Before in-game emails, there was a feature in the freeware prototype to CSD, Ore no Ryomi 2, which presented players with a fictional news article at the start of each in-game day. These served to add some humor and personality into the game as well as give players the impression that there was a world outside of your extremely limited view of the restaurant.
During the development of CSD, David decided to include “spam emails” in the game that the player could optionally read in between levels. These served the same purposes as the news articles from ONR2, but they became more beloved because they were an optional lighthearted break from the fast-paced gameplay rather than something that got in the way of playing the game.
CSD1 had a total of 214 spam emails, written by 13 volunteer community members of the Vertigo Gaming Inc. forums, including a few by myself and fellow CSD series writer, Nick.
A Larger Purpose and Way More Emails
David wanted CSD2 to be bigger and better than CSD1 in every way. That meant he wanted it to have more foods, more levels, more music, more art, and more spam emails. David decided to hire professionals to write the emails this time around rather than rely on pro bono work from fans. As luck would have it, two of his fans were now professionals! Nick and I independently reached out to find out if we could help with anything, and we were both hired.
Once again, the emails’ intended purpose was to provide optional levity in between levels of fast-paced gameplay. However, the CSD2 emails would go on to serve an even greater purpose than any of us originally intended, as they provided the foundation for the beloved lore of the franchise. To learn how the lore was accidentally born out of the CSD2 emails, read this previous newsletter on the subject.
Nick and I found that David was incredibly flexible in terms of what we could write. As I recall, the only restrictions he gave us were that the emails had to be family-friendly, mostly plausible (no supernatural elements such as ghosts), and they couldn’t repeat the same gag more than a handful of times. As such, Nick and I covered a wide range of subjects and tones from utterly absurd one-offs to ongoing series that lampooned the harsh working conditions of big studio game companies and the questionable ethics of crowdfunding. As such, CSD2 contains a mixture of low- and high-brow jokes, references for communities both big and niche, as well as references to our personal lives that literally nobody else will pick up on.
All in all, CSD2 had 556 emails written by two very weird but definitely professional guys.
Upgrading From Emails to Story
Emails were completely absent from CSD3 for the following very, very good reasons:
David wanted CSD3 to include an overarching storyline, but writing emails again would have taken up time that would be better spent developing a strong story
Lots of CSD2 players didn’t even read the emails (partially because of CSD2’s questionable UI design) so emails were no longer an expected or valuable part of the series
The idea of writing even more completely random emails seemed really, really hard—we probably would have ended up retreading jokes from CSD2 on accident, and that’s not cool
In the end, even though there were fans who missed the emails, moving away from them was absolutely the right way to go. Sure, it would be cool to fit more of everything into each game, but we’re a humble indie studio with limited time and resources to do so. But that’s a good thing because it forces us to look critically at everything we do and cut away as much fat as possible so we deliver the leanest, most delicious game each and every time—and CSD3 was oh so delicious!
Thanks for reading! Talk to you again next month!
— Ryan Matejka
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August Discord Challenge
Our August 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!