Chef Wars - Food Discovery RPG by Mindcake Games

Hey guys!

Excited to be doing our virgin post as Mindcake Games!

About Chef Wars
We're a 3-person indie doing a Food Discovery RPG! Players travel around the world to recruit chefs, source ingredients, and invent hundreds of real-life recipes. They can then use those recipes to win themed kitchen battles!

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The battles are quite simple. Players pick the recipe they think best suits the competition themes, and get scored by the judges (think the old DOS Pizza Tycoon, or Suikoden's Cooking Battle mini-game). If you win, you get cash and fame! The game's depth shines in the prep-work required outside battles:

• - You can travel to 500+ cities and towns around Europe and Asia. The map is fully and freely explorable - the pic below is literally Europe at 6% zoom! The point is to learn about difficult cultures and cuisines.
• - Each location has markets with specialty ingredients, about 200+ worldwide. Then you can combine those ingredients to invent and upgrade over 900 recipes, each with their own attributes.
• - There are 11 judges with unique personalities. Example, some judges really care about your dish's relevance to the theme. Some just care about having an upgraded/tasty recipe. And each judge has preferences too - like some like French dishes, or spicy food, etc.
• - Each recruitable chef has unique traits which makes them good with certain dishes. There are storylines and missions for each chef as well.

Our Inspiration
We really love games like Civilization, Koei's Uncharted Waters New Horizons, and Carmen Sandiego! So we want to build mobile games which let players explore the world and learn about different cultures. With Chef Wars, it just happens to be about food!

Progress
We're actually quite late into our development, and hoping to launch in the next 2 months (depending on bugs and optimization). We do welcome any feedback and support - things you think would be cool! We plan to update the game every month (new chefs, regions, recipes, missions) if there's some love for the game!

**Update**
We're now in Open Beta on Android, and closed beta on iOS!
If you'd like to play on Android, we've been featured on Google Early Access here: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=air.com.mindcakegames.chefwars
If you'd like to play on iOS via Testflight, send us a note at [email protected]!

You can also join our FB playtest group here:
http://www.facebook.com/groups/chefwars/

Or follow us on FB or Twitter:
FB: http://www.facebook.com/mindcakegames/
Twitter: http://twitter.com/mindcakes



Thanks!
Cliff, Karlo and Lois from the Mindcake Team

 

Thanks thanks! Really appreciate that!

 

Thanks guys, totally appreciate it!
Forgot to mention there are limited social features like friend and global rankings, and campers/tents of your friends appearing on the map for goodies!

We'd like to expand the game with more stuff too like PVP, city claiming / master chef, etc. if things go well!

 

Hey @JackDerp,

Thanks a lot, and sorry for the long post ahead. We've thought about this a lot and feel it's an important point.

While it's F2P, we won't be building paywalls since the point of the game is world exploration. Things you can buy are mostly vanity and convenience features, like:
- Slots to recruit more chefs and learn more recipes, if you want to hold more at a time.
- Some special chefs and skins.
- You can also pay gems to teleport to some cities you already visited, but you can also do that with cash (in-game currency), hoof it over the world map, or if a city has a boss you can teleport there for free.

You can actually finish the game without paying a cent - using the default number of slots and with chefs who are already available across the globe. There are also no ads.

We know we might be shooting ourselves in the foot monetization-wise since it's pretty generous. But we found that putting paywalls discourages discovery and exploration. Ex, we experimented with heart/gas systems but it was jarring and limiting for the type of experience we wanted to create.

 

Gosh, thanks so much @Slate! Hope we're not setting ourselves up for ultra-lofty expectations haha!

We took inspiration from Pizza Tycoon and Suikoden's judging/scoring sequence. But ours is a bit more in-depth - each judge has their own algorithm based on their personality. We don't have Pizza Tycoon's freeform create your own pizza though! We'd really love that maybe in a future update - but since we're covering all kinds of food and not just pizzas, it's gonna be a doozy! We also don't have "management" elements like running your own biz - we're sticking with the explore-battle-invent/train cycle!





Yes, New Horizons is my all-time favorite game growing up as a kid! And that's where we took our world exploration mechanic. You can literally travel anywhere in Europe and Asia! I locked myself up in my room for like 2 weeks to create the world map tile by tile and make it accurate vs. the real world!

 

Thanks! Appreciate the support!

Haha it's been so hard to eat reasonably while making the game! I always get cravings depending on which country I'm researching - Japanese, Italian, French, Thai... agh!

We'll know the game is successful if theres a worldwide spike of food cravings!!!

 

Haha thanks guys!

@Applepen - OMG, Karlo and I get hungry everyday building it. Like, I would get major cravings for the specific geography I'm working on that day - Japanese, French, Russian, Chinese, etc!

Here's some ingredients you can find in Chef Wars to get you on your way! Maybe you can recognize many of them?

 

Thanks! By my latest count we cover 55 countries, with about 900 recipes!
35 of those are Korean! Can you recognize any below?