Chef Wars - Food Discovery RPG by Mindcake Games

Thanks again for the lovely article!

As Accidentalrebel said, we added more free gems to buy more recipe slots for Sylvie for the launch build. Then will consider other ways to distribute free gems post-launch (in-game events), without hurting the balance. Another way is to offer a very-discounted one time purchase for max recipe slots across all chefs!

Thanks again!

 

Hey @JackDerp - will post a Release Thread soon! So sorry, the two of us have just been swamped with the launch and helping players!

 

Thanks for the feedback! These are all good suggestions and something we need to consider for the future. Currently, we still have a ways to go to optimize the game, as we've seen that revealing too large a map and letting it zoom, scroll, or pan around can impact the performance or worse, cause crashing. Once we have this better, we can start to think about how implement these!

 

Thanks so much for the feedback Fingon. I'm Cliff, the game designer! There's two parts to this question - the relevance of the system per se, and then the balancing that follows once we feel the system is needed.

When we started designing the game, we put the recipe slot system in for a couple of reasons:
1) Design following RPG Mechanics - we wanted to go the route of some RPGs and Card Battle games where you had to make strategic choices about what you brought into battle. By making each character own/learn the recipes, and allowing them to upgrade it over time, the recipes functions similarly to equipment, or perhaps upgradable skills/magic that appears in some RPGs. If you always had access to all (eventually) 900 recipes, and these recipes could be selected across any chef, and the upgrade of one recipe also upgraded it across all chefs, the challenge and tension would drastically reduce. You could argue that would mean a more focused game built entirely on finding ingredients and inventing recipes, but that could be both a plus, or a turnoff to some players who enjoy the battle challenge.

Btw, forgetting recipes doesn't destroy the upgrade progress your chef has had with the recipe so far, but you would need to re-invent it if you want to relearn it at some point. The cost of forgetting is therefore the ingredients you would need to recollect and the percentage of failure (which diminishes as Creativity increases), and this same cost creates the tension that forces some players to be more strategic about what recipes they want to have.

2) Design for Battle Loop Simplicity - we wanted to keep the battle loop simple. UI-wise, we experimented with no recipe slots, 50 recipe slots, then 20 (the current once fully brain-boostered). Once you got to 100+ recipes, having to manage or choose from many at a time for each battle, even if there were elegant ways to filter or choose your favorites, could be very unwieldly. With about 8 freely recruitable chefs in the game including Sylvie, a full arsenal (without ever expanding recipe slots or paying gems) would be 45 recipes, which is actually quite an expansive hit list already all the way to Asia. Many recipes fit multiple regions, because many of the tags could be applicable across cultures (Aromatic), or half of the judges are more power- or preference-focused rather than theme-focused. If you add the number of gems you can get for free by winning boss battles (believe around 50), that's an additional +10 slots or 55 recipes without having to spend a cent. Though even that could already be quite unwieldly for some players to sift through at the battle recipe selection screen.

3) Monetization - we of course wanted to earn as well and feed ourselves! We've been making the game for about 3 years and funding from our own savings. We felt like selling slots for added convenience (if you want to have an expansive selection) was reasonable, while those who did not might just have to be slightly more strategic about what they brought in.

Now the next question is about balance. I definitely agree with some of your points, and while I still believe in having a recipe slot system, perhaps much of the frustration is due to some balance issues.

We did eventually realize after a lot of feedback that 5 slots on Sylvie as the starting character was too restrictive, especially as you're only starting to learn the ropes! So we brought that to 10 for her in the 1.1.3 update (other chefs still 5). Though this applied to new users who started new games only in the 1.1.3 patch... we couldn't change for old users wholesale because everyone had different save states (some might be past 10 slots already, and forcing them back to 10 would be bad; and we couldn't just +5 Sylvie across the board as some users could be 16-20 slots on her already). In case your Sylvie is still 5 or you've upgraded to less than 10 before the patch, and lost out on the +5 slots, we'd gladly top up 25 gems / 5 slots for you if you share us your account details at [email protected]!

In coming patches, we also want to add more ways to earn gems besides boss battles - through a daily login reward perhaps, or some social actions. So that the premium / gem economy can be accessed in two ways - either over time, or paying if you want to accelerate that progress. This means, over more days of play, folks can slowly expand their slots (or use their gems on other stuff).

As it stands though, the game has no direct paywalls. We're not gating time spent through an energy system (you could farm endlessly for cash in the France area, including some no-cost fights in Paris), and we've tested that you can finish the game and beat Baron without spending a single cent (there are many paths to him). We've also allowed both offline and online play - most Free to Play games require consistent online connections so the economy is tightly controlled, among other things. There's also no strong multiplayer or PVP loop which you have to do to get anywhere, since the game is mainly a story-driven romp. So we really tried to make payments focused on convenience/acceleration if the player so chooses.

We know that we still have a lot to improve and we love hearing back from players! It's our first game as a team, and we're constantly listening, adjusting, and evolving with the community! So I really love hearing these kinds of questions as it also lets me think more deeply about where we can tweak or balance.