Hiya! My name is Samantha, and I’ve kidnapped the progress update this month to tell you all about how we cooked up a huge buffet of food art for CSF.
With over 100 foods (and over 500 recipes), designing and drawing out all that deliciousness was a daunting undertaking. But that’s my favorite thing about art—taking crazy ideas from your imagination and figuring out how you can bring them to life. Things like perspective, anatomy, composition, and color all create interesting problems, which frankly have no business being so darned fun. And art for games creates even more challenges to think about: animation, performance, working with UI, and communicating with players through art.
So how do we tackle these challenges, dozens and dozens of times over?
It all starts with research. Like the CSD games, we wanted to have a collection of foods from lots of different cultures. This meant journeying across countless recipe websites, local and travel blogs from around the world, and many deeply compelling Wikipedia rabbit holes. If there’s only one thing I learned during this process, it’s that you haven’t truly lived until you’ve spent an hour untangling the complex web behind the moniker of a certain iconic Canadian pastry (which for legal reasons, shall remain nameless). And it may sound silly, but sometimes the best research is to just get out there and eat a whole bunch of delicious food—there’s a reason we call the IRL food channel #research-and-development in the official Discord server!
Delicious field research, top: Cauliflower steak at a friendship reunion, pre-opera cashew cheesecake, a bike pit stop sundae.
Bottom: Dumplings from a long summer sun-kissed night in Reykjavik, pre-karaoke Korean BBQ.
Naturally, with a diverse group of people working together, some personal picks from the Vertigo team also made their way onto the final menu. I don’t want to spoil too much, but we’ve got an Aussie icon coming to the game courtesy of writer Nick, a Japanese-American treat from fellow artist Tristan, and with my partner being from Romania, I couldn’t resist sneaking in one of our own family favorites.
After whetting my appetite with all that tasty research, it was time to get down to work with David (chief food officer) and Lizzy (our lead artist). Let’s take a peek at the process through one of the first foods you’ll encounter in CSF: the doughnut!
First, we came up with a list of ingredients; some “base” ingredients would always stick around, while others guest-starred in different recipes. For the doughnut, the base ingredients were dough and glaze, with optional toppings of chocolate, strawberry, nuts, apples, coconut, and bacon.
Once we had a few dishes under our belt, we’d look for opportunities to repeat these components later on, to help jive with the feeling of cooking from a food cart with a set collection of ingredients each day. This also meant we could re-use some assets between recipes to save on working time and texture space.
After we had a general plan for the ingredients and how they could be prepped and plated in different combinations, I’d sketch out a rough mockup.
Each food started with a kind of “storyboard”, adding ingredients one-by-one to get a feel for how things would look in game. I’d mix and match ingredient combos while drawing to make sure that different sets looked good together.
At this stage, I’d add, remove, and edit ingredients, based on Lizzy and David’s feedback. Next, it was time to dig down into the “rendering” phase: the process of coloring, shading, detailing, and polishing everything. As part of this process, I’d spend some time online looking at close-up photos of different ingredients to understand them better, because there’s nothing quite like staring at ten different macro shots of pecans to get you in the zone.
Once the initial pass was done, I’d get some feedback from Lizzy on tweaking things like color balance, detail placement, and lighting, and we’d be ready for service. Our goal here in the final is to create something that pops with almost impossible warmth and color, while still being grounded in a mostly realistic style.
A quick snapshot of the doughnut process on the left, with the final image on the right.
Speaking of style, getting our food’s visual style figured out was also a cool challenge early on. Food has definitely played a substantial role in my art journey, so it was nice to push that further and adapt to a new style. It took a few tries for me to get that style just right, as I played around with textures and outlines before coming to a softer and more vibrant aesthetic with Lizzy and David’s guidance.
Top, from left: Two previous studies I’d done from reference, an initial style experiment for CSF, and the final style we landed on.
Bottom: Some quick paintings I did to familiarize myself with the style (not in-game foods).
After the art for each food was finished, I’d get to come up with some different recipes, which was an amusing exercise in wordplay and an excuse for me to foist a load of truly terrible puns onto the team and our players (sorry, everyone). Consequently, we have the “cocoa nut” doughnut to complement our “Bawkward” chicken sandwich, “Pita Pan” shawarma, and a bacon double-cheese double-patty burger known as “Sir Cholestalot”.
And so, after all that research, drawing, painting, and punning…all that’s left is to do it again a hundred times, and boom! There’s our smorgasbord, ready for players to serve up to the denizens of Helianthus.
THE SANDWICHES ARE HERE.
For me, the coolest thing about working on indie games is getting to see, and help shape, lots of different parts of a project. While most of my time on CSF has been spent on food art, I also got to work on cooking equipment, visual effects, and even lend a hand with a couple of backgrounds and extra characters.
One of my favorite memories from working on CSF is drawing Nori’s cookbook. This one was a super creative task where I got to make plenty of little stickers, magazine clippings, and photos, exploring how Nori’s handwriting and doodles changed as she grew up. There was a lot of collaboration with the story team on this one to connect with the game’s narrative, and it was a ton of fun helping to bring Nori’s cooking journey over the years to life!
The taco page from Nori’s cookbook, with some details added to age it up, and a couple of magazine clippings created for other pages.
On a personal note, I’m endlessly grateful that I’ve gotten to indulge three lifelong passions of mine—art, cooking, and video games—working on a team with such talented, kind, and all-around amazing people. Suffice it to say, being a chef of video game art is a dream come true for me. Of course, the fact that I’ve been a Cook, Serve superfan for almost a decade now certainly doesn’t hurt, either.
I hope you enjoy the food art in CSF, because I had so much fun working on it. And if this post has gotten you hungry for more, join me in grabbing a few doughnuts while you wait for David’s delicious update on the gameplay redesign coming next month. Until then, happy cookin’!
Samantha
P.S. If you like, you can check out more of my art on my website, Twitter, and Instagram :)