Howdy everyone! We’ve been hard at work on Cook Serve Forever and listening to player feedback, as well as issuing rapid patches to get new features in quickly. I wanted to share what we’re cooking up in the next two major updates we have planned and what’s to come in the future! Note that this is all subject to change and is still very much in active development.
End of June
Part of the great thing about Early Access is finding out what works and what doesn’t, mainly thanks to our fans on the official Discord, where you can talk directly with devs and help influence future updates!
Recipe Selection
Right now I feel the game isn’t quite as fluid as I’d like it to be, and recipe selection seems to feel less and less like a choice and more of a chore the further in you play. To remedy this we’re switching the game over to a CSD2-style fixed menu- basically, each location will have six preselected recipes, and you’ll be able to choose a location and go directly into cookin’. This also makes restarts much easier! But don’t worry, you’ll still get occasional story cutscenes with Baz before heading into a location.
We also have plans to make recipes more impactful as to what you get and how they contribute to your end-of-day XP- more on that as we get closer to the update.
In-Game Cookin’
We’re always fine-tuning the gameplay elements and this month you’ll see improvements to food animations, additional prep stages for foods, and some fun graphical flourishes to the robots that come in and order as they’re a bit too quiet and don’t do too much right now.
Progression Clarity
Finally, we’re going to be improving the location menu UI so it’s more apparent what locations have side quests, what is needed to unlock some locations, etc. And many of y’all want Moraine added back in, so we’re going to do just that, complete with new stickers to earn! (we hope to have Moraine in the next update or the July update).
End of July
We will have our first major story update at the end of July! This will add story-based content that continues directly where the game currently ends in EA. This update will be a little smaller than the other ones we have planned (which will introduce a ton of new locations and events) but will still have about 2-3 additional hours of story-based gameplay!
Progression Overhaul
Along with this is a complete overhaul of our progression system- we realize that the way the game progresses the story is a bit complicated and vague (currently, the game logs each day you play as a “day complete” and once you play 50 days you’ll have gone through all the story content in the game currently- however that count is hidden from the player). We’re going to be moving to a sticker-based progression system that lets you complete areas to gain stickers and move the story along in that way. This makes getting through the first part of the game much faster, which is why we’ve opted to do this for the July update since there will be more to play. We will also make some slight adjustments to XP that will make getting to level 20 in locations faster. As you progress through the game you will also gain some abilities that let you gain XP much faster at the start of a new location, making that grind way less to begin with, but we know a lot can be improved at this starting area.
I’m really excited for y’all to meet all the new characters and side quests you’ll have in this update, it’s gonna be a ton of fun, and will get you that much closer to being an all-time great chef!
Future Updates
As we go through player feedback and adjust our schedule to deliver fixes and improvements as fast as we can you can expect our original road map to change, schedule-wise. We’re still on track to meet our planned updates but we may shift some dates around to ensure we can make it the best possible experience, such as for local co-op. Be sure to watch our Discord for all the latest news there.
Plus we have a slew of big announcements in the Cook, Serve, Delicious! universe coming in July! Be sure to subscribe to our newsletter as we’ll be teasing more soon- as fun as Cook Serve Forever has been in shaking things up, I’m always thinking of ways to continue the original Cook, Serve, Delicious! formula of fast and frantic gameplay in new games, so stay tuned!
Thanks y’all and if you’re enjoying our content updates be sure to leave a review, it helps so much!
-David Galindo
Creative Lead, CSF