Hey everyone, in our last post we looked at your feedback following the first week of release. Taking on board what the community asked for, we’ve been hard at work on creating a highly customizable Freeplay mode, which is now live for you all to play and enjoy! This is the first iteration of Freeplay and we’ll continue to develop it alongside other existing systems and mechanics as we move through early access.
In this post I’ll be giving you a full breakdown of all the new features and options that come with Recipe for Disaster’s first EA update.
Difficulty presets
First of all, we wanted to make it really easy for players to jump straight into a new game, so when you first select Freeplay mode you will have the following options to choose from:
Easy - You’ll have lots of starting money, decent starting popularity, and many employees to choose from each day. There will be no losing conditions. Dirt will accumulate slowly, fire probability will be low, and employee stress will be easy to manage!
Medium - Starting money and popularity will be average, and you’ll have less prospective employees each day. You’ll lose if you have a negative balance at the end of the day or if an employee is fired or quits. Dirt and employee stress will accumulate faster, and fires will be more frequent. This is the default Campaign difficulty.
Hard - Prepare for a real challenge. Starting money and popularity will be low, and you’ll have very few employees to choose from. You’ll lose if you have a negative balance at any time or if just one employee hits a breakpoint! Customer flow and variety will be high, and they’ll be much less patient and way less willing to pay high prices. They’ll also be far more critical with their review scores. You’ll see dirt and employee stress accumulate faster, and fires will be an ever present threat...
Custom - Now this is where things get interesting, here you’ll be able to customize your own game down to the finest detail.
Freeplay - Custom settings
Naturally many of you will want to be able to configure your experience, so we’ve made it possible for you to be able to tweak almost everything in the game. You can also share your settings with other players as each configuration will generate its own seed.
General settings
Starting money - How much money you start with. You can also toggle infinite money on/off.
Starting popularity - Your restaurant’s starting popularity.
Location - Select whether your restaurant will be located in the residential area, suburbs, projects, or downtown.
Losing conditions - Select your losing conditions for the game:
- Negative balance at end of day (Medium)
- An employee is fired or quits (Medium)
- Negative balance at any time (Hard)
- Hit any employee breakpoint (Hard)
PLEASE NOTE: We’re planning on adding more of these at a later date.
Dynamic events - Toggle customer and employee dynamic events on/off.
World events - Toggle world events such as ingredient discounts or customer rush on/off.
Dining room settings
Theme - Pick your customer’s food preferences from seafood, steak house, fast-food, homely, or none.
Customer variety - Decide how differentiated your customer’s food preferences will be within the chosen theme.
Customer flow - Configure the number of customers that will come to your restaurant.
Patience rate - Choose how quickly your customers will run out of patience.
Restrooms - Decide how frequently your customers will use the restroom.
Dirtiness - Select the speed in which dirt accumulates within the restaurant.
Reviews - Define how lenient or harsh your customers will be with their review ratings.
Kitchen settings
Starting employees - Pick how many prospective employees will be available on day 1.
Employees for hire - Configure how many employees will be available to hire each day.
Employee salaries - Decide how high or low your employee’s salaries will be.
Stress rate - Set the difficulty for managing employee stress levels.
Fires - Set the frequency of fire disasters.
Fair dishes markup % - Choose how much your customers will be willing to pay for their food.
Infinite ingredients - Toggle infinite ingredients on/off.
Objectives & Trophies
We’ve designed Recipe for Disaster’s Freeplay mode so the player experience can range from calm and relaxing (for those of you who just want to build), to intense and stressful (for those that would prefer a challenge). While there are no ‘required’ objectives to hit, we thought it would be fun to include some optional objectives to work towards beating. Of course you can choose to ignore these but if you do decide to have a go at them you’ll unlock trophies which are placeable objects that give your restaurant a huge ambiance boost!
Each trophy tier is linked to three objectives which relate to core aspects of restaurant management:
Food profits: Make € X from selling food.
5 star reviews: Gain X 5 star customer reviews.
Seated tables: Have X seated tables at any one time.
...and at each tier you can unlock:
Tier 1 trophy - Foodies review
Tier 2 trophy - TripInstructor’s Award
Tier 3 trophy - ‘The Dish’
Tier 4 trophy - Tasty Cup
Tier 5 trophy - Golden Chef Statue
Getting all of these trophies will be no easy task, and we’d love to see screenshots of your award-winning restaurants on Twitter and Discord.
Thanks to your suggestions, we've also added 25 new ingredients to Freeplay mode (we'll add these to the campaign as it expands further).
That’s all for now but we’ve got some festive treats lined up in December so we’ll be back with another update very soon!
Alex Mochi
Founder & Lead Designer - Dapper Penguin Studios