Hi, my name is Nick, and I’m the Voice Director and Co-Writer of Cook Serve Forever. While David is hard at work redesigning the game, I thought I’d update you all on the narrative front, where we are rapidly nearly completion.

Cook Serve Forever is a very narrative rich game. Ryan Matejka and I started writing the game back in early 2021, and by the time we recorded the voice work in July 2022, we had a 250 page screenplay. Unlike previous Cook Serve Delicious games where you play as a silent protagonist (Chef), the spin-off nature of Cook Serve Forever encouraged us to mix things up by featuring a fully-voiced, fully-realized protagonist in Nori Kaga (voiced by Elspeth Eastman). All-in-all, 15 voice actors provided voice work for over 30 characters who appear in the game. Some of whom you’ll have already met in the Early Access build, with the rest coming soon (including a particularly wonderful character voiced by SungWon Cho (ProZD)).

Being an indie team, we don’t have the resources that triple-A studios have, so we had to choose carefully how we delivered our scenes. Throughout the game, you can divide the narrative beats into three different categories:

1. Fully Animated Cutscenes
2. Dialogue Box (still images and text that play in time with the VO)
3. Off-Screen Dialogue (chatter that happens during gameplay)

As you’d expect, fully animated cutscenes are very resource intensive so these are used very sparingly, reserved for the most important story beats.

To create fully animated cutscenes, our Animation Director (Andrea Nagai) works off character designs created by our art team, and after careful storyboarding, painstakingly animates each frame against the completed voice-work. I then composite these frames with the other layers in the scene, and then ship it off to sound design and music for the finishing touches.

Above: Storyboarding (by Andrea Nagai) next to the final scene. In this scene, we hear what Brie’s watching while seeing her reaction to it.

Being able to only use fully animated cutscenes sparingly forces us to be really efficient in our storytelling, in a way that having unlimited resources wouldn’t. Take the opening cutscene of the game. We need to convey several ideas: (1) Chef Rhubarb is a world-renowned chef, who (2) has an incredibly popular TV show, and (3) serves as an idol to our protagonist Nori, who (4) lives a much poorer life than her hero. It’s a complicated scene, that we had to write and storyboard carefully to ensure we were using our resources as effectively as possible.

Above: Stills from the game’s opening cutscene, showing Nori’s childhood obsession with Chef Rhubarb

The narrative portion of the game is nearly complete: we are in the final stages of putting together the last scene in the game. Working on the narrative for Cook Serve Forever has been an amazing experience, and I’m genuinely excited for you all to all experience the wonderful characters and stories the game has to offer when it releases later this year.