You Are Chef
Writing a Game Where the Protagonist Could Be Literally Anyone
Hey chefs! It’s me, Ryan.
That greeting is actually very relevant to this month’s topic. The Cook, Serve, Delicious! series has always been about putting you in the shoes of a chef and restaurant manager. While this was easy in the first two games because the in-game chef is never shown on screen (though CSD2 allows players to select from a selection of different avatars), our decision to write a story into CSD3 made this a bit more complicated.
Making Chef Into Anyone
As Nicholas Kraak and I began developing the story for CSD3, we strongly believed that the player should feel like they are the chef and this is their food truck instead of feeling like they are playing as some other character. However, we also wanted to include two speaking characters that would interact with the in-game chef. This presented us with a lot of questions, including:
How do Whisk and Cleaver refer to the player in spoken dialog?
How do we visually portray the chef in cutscenes?
How do we write a story around a main character that could be literally anyone?
How do we tell a story with voiced characters where the main character is completely voiceless?
What’s more, we quickly realized we had to not only answer these questions but we had to do so in such a way that players didn’t realize we were working around any limitations at all.
Chef's Name
Once we confirmed that every line of dialog in CSD3 would be voice acted, we knew we needed the players’ chef to have a nickname that could be respectfully applied to anyone, regardless of name, age, gender identity, race, and cultural background. While other games work around this by giving the main character a last name (or just a letter of the alphabet) to identify with, that concept just didn’t sit well with us because it still meant we had to give the character some sort of identity separate from the player.
Fortunately, the solution was right in front of us, and we decided very early on that the main character of CSD3 would be referred to by the title of “Chef.” After all, how cool and immersive would it be for players to occasionally be called Chef by their two robot companions?! We hoped it would give players the same sense of immersion and pride that XCOM players get from being called “Commander” on the regular. As obvious of a solution as this seems in retrospect, it was a real “aha!” moment for us at the time.
Furthermore, we challenged ourselves to avoid using pronouns of any sort, since we eventually decided that even gender-neutral pronouns might alienate some players from feeling fully immersed as a Chef. While this made the writing incredibly difficult at times, I’m confident it was the right choice.
Chef's Appearance
The chef of the CSD series has typically been represented in promotional and cover art as a white male with some kind of mustache (though there have been exceptions) and that was the case with CSD3 as well.
But this wasn’t actually meant to represent the main character—in fact, much of the CSD3 promotional art had to be created before we even had a chance to think about how we would represent the chef in the game. To make the player feel like Chef, we gently asked David if he and the artists would be cool with making their jobs more difficult by obscuring Chef’s appearance throughout the entire game.
So for the initial cutscene in which Whisk and Cleaver dig Chef out of the rubble, the player sees this through Chef’s eyes (bonus points for this choice hopefully telling players right away that they are Chef). For every cutscene showing the inside of the small food truck, artist Lizzy Dawson cleverly hid all of Chef’s identifying features by coming up with new ways to show Chef being exhausted from a hard day of work.
Chef’s Role in the Story
Unfortunately, having a voiceless, anonymous protagonist really limited the story we could tell with Chef. Think of other games that go this route and you’ll notice that all of the main characters’ stories and goals are exclusively in line with the player’s story and goals. For example, Gordon Freeman of the Half-Life games doesn’t learn a lesson, grow as a character, or have any personal goals in any of the games—his lessons are things like “I have to turn this valve to get to where I need to go,” his growth is strictly through how many weapons he carries on him, and his goal is to save humanity.
As such, we quickly realized that this was the route we had to take with Chef. Therefore, we settled on the fact that the Chef wants to get to the Iron Cook Food Truck Challenge because the player does. Of course, this doesn’t make for a satisfying or emotionally compelling experience, so we instead wrote a story that functionally works around the player by giving all of the emotional beats, character growth moments, and lessons to Whisk and Cleaver. In a weird way, this makes CSD3 more of Whisk and Cleaver’s story than Chef’s.
Hopefully, through all of this decision-making and hard work, it’s easier for you to really believe that you’re on a wonderful road trip in your own food truck with your friends Whisk and Cleaver.
Thanks for reading! Talk to you again next month!
— Ryan Matejka
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September Discord Challenge
Our September community challenge is up and running on the CSD Discord — this month: submit a CSD-related meme! 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!