2 Years of Game Development - Chef RPG

this video is sponsored by squarespace hey noah here i'm a former architectural designer and now an indie game developer working on the open world pixel art game chef rpg i started my game development journey exactly two years ago and i want to share my experience with how i got started with game dev my process of making chef rpg as well as some of the lessons i've learned along the way going all the way to the very beginning i think it was pure chance and alignment of different events that led me to take a break from my primary profession architecture and work on game development instead in may 2020 i just completed my masters in architecture and was looking to take a break maybe take a trip before going back to working at an office but right around then the virus lockdowns happened and everyone was stuck at home with no clear idea of how long it will last i remember one night i was browsing youtube and came across an indie game called the last night which was the super atmospheric pixlr game being developed by a couple of indie devs at that time i only knew of indie developers from places like mini clips and armor games and i had no idea indie developers could make such an amazing looking game i always knew i wanted to do some work in games eventually maybe contribute my architectural knowledge into video game world design but i've never really thought about making my own game this beautiful pixlr game really fascinated me and it's what triggered me into dipping my toes into game development there was also something about pixel art that really grabbed me and right then and there i knew i wanted to make some sort of pixelart rpg game so here's the first game i started to create called final platform it's a really simple physics based game where you control this ball that is always moving forward and you have to guide it to the end without falling off i don't think this game plays that well but it was a super useful learning experience that got me familiar with the unity engine and what it takes to launch a game while i was working on this practice game the idea for chef rpg was forming in my head i knew i wanted to make a non-combat focused rpg because most rpgs are focused on fighting i didn't want to go in that direction because it would ultimately mean you would have to compete with the bethesda rpgs or final fantasy games or any of the popular mmorpgs out there and i didn't think i could contribute anything new in that space i had a lot of crazy ideas for the game i wanted to make i wanted a cyberpunk city there was time travel there was an alternate ancient fantasy world that you would travel back in time to the original idea for the game involved running some sort of tavern there would be a restaurant on the ground level and rooms at the top where guests would stay and your player would manage and grow this tavern at the same time you would be managing life and exploring this strange new fantasy world here were some of the very first pixel art drawings for people and buildings that could exist in this world the noodle stand might have been the first thing i drew because at one point there was the idea of your player running a noodle stand in the beginning of the game and here are some of the first character concepts after thinking about it for a while i quickly realized that all those ideas would be way too much stuff to put into an indie game the game concept was convoluted and overly complex and needed to be simplified i got rid of the time travel and fantasy world got rid of the tavern aspect and just focused on food you're a chef and this game focuses on your journey that's a much simpler and stronger concept than the time traveling tavern keeper idea having a simple and easy to understand concept allowed the game to essentially begin designing itself and it was a lot easier to make design decisions on what should or should not be included in the game after finishing and releasing final platform and gaining a good feel for unity i started development on chef rpg in june of 2020 with a few concept characters and buildings it's a strange thing that i can't really describe but creating these initial pixlr assets just felt really good and it was a really exciting time to start on this bigger rpg game two weeks into development the first map was complete with a player character that you can walk around with it contained your restaurant and player house as well as some of the other buildings that would be homes for future npcs at this point i quickly realized that the coding for an rpg is much more complicated than for a simple platformer but luckily there were already a lot of great youtube tutorials that helped me figure out the parts i didn't understand a lot of the early weeks of development was spent following tutorials step by step to implement specific systems that i would have no chance of creating on my own after seven weeks of development there was a working inventory system a build mode system for placing furniture in the restaurant and in the house a day night system and a basic safe system that can save items in your inventory i had begun to experiment with some basic ai for customers that walk around in the restaurant at this time there were no pathfinding systems so they kind of just walked around aimlessly a restaurant management system was also created where you can store ingredients and manage recipes this would form the basis for the restaurant gameplay here you can see some of the first iterations of food art we had in the game in a game like this i felt that it was worth the time to put an extra effort into creating larger food illustrations these illustrations are put on recipe cards that you can collect like in a trading card game a shop system was also implemented around this time so you can buy and sell ingredients it was also the first time a character portrait was created for a main mpc at this time she didn't have a name and i was referring to her as the android bubble tea girl in october i went back to work at an architecture office since i had to pay the bills so i could only work on the game part time putting in two to three hours a day i wanted to find a way back to working on the game full time since i knew there was no way i could finish the game within a reasonable timeline working only three hours a day at this time i couldn't stand looking at these bare naked characters anymore so i began developing an equipment system i remember in the first two weeks of working at the new office i would come home and draw these clothing spreadsheets endlessly and then had to individually rig them into animations which was not a very fun time after what seemed like an endless grind chef rpg finally had a working character creation system and an equipment system that you can use to customize your character since it was october and very close to halloween i made this weird little pumpkin map with a mini game in it kind of was a break from all the clothing sprite sheets i had to make in november the interior of the cyberpunk style hotel was completed this hotel will likely be the first place that your player would stay rather than the house i think it would be more interesting for the story if you are this traveling chef and you have to stay at a cheap hotel for a while before being able to purchase a proper house in late november i began the first plans for what would become the town of white ash harbor which is the main starting town and the place where you can go meet all the locals because i was drawing this entire map all in one go a lot of it was rushed and the pixel art wasn't drawn as well as it could be around this time this youtube channel started getting more views and i began receiving a lot more feedback on ways to improve the art which was super valuable sometimes when you spend too long on a project or staring at a piece of art you start losing sight of what's good and what's not i had only been drawing pixel art for a few months and i learned from the feedback that there are a lot of pixel art specific techniques that you should learn and you can't draw pixel art the same way you paint the painting i probably should have followed some basic pixel art tutorials in the beginning to avoid things like banding pillow shading and learning to use a color palette these things would have prevented a lot of mistakes and it could have saved a lot of time in the long run before jumping ahead i want to take a moment to talk about this video's sponsor squarespace an all-in-one platform for hosting and building websites they have a ton of great templates that you can choose from and i recently used squarespace to create a website for chef rpg what surprised me was the amount of customization available and you can mix and match different templates to create pages suited to your needs squarespace lets you insert short videos so i put one right at the front which looks pretty cool they have this great automated image scaling system so i never have to worry about if images or videos are cropped incorrectly scrolling down we have a system for collecting emails which can be linked to squarespace's emailing system if you ever need to send out important updates they also have great portfolio tools that automatically adjust the layouts which allowed me to create a screenshots page where you can click and enlarge individual images it's definitely a useful platform for artists and designers looking to create an online portfolio or game developers looking to make a website for their game if you are interested check out squarespace.com for a free trial and when you're ready to launch go to squarespace.com pixel architect to save 10 off your first purchase of a website or domain now back to the video in february i began the most challenging part of developing chef rpg which was the restaurant game loop the challenge with this portion of the game is the amount of things that are happening all at once the chefs are cooking their orders waiters are running around and delivering new dishes new customers are always arriving with new orders that must be fulfilled there's just so much data that needs to be passed between the ai and the furniture on top of that pathfinding scripts are constantly running so that these characters can get to where they need to go it took a couple weeks but eventually i managed to code the basic gameplay cycle first you place your ingredients in the fridge select which dishes you would like to use from the restaurant manager make sure there are some staff members ready and make sure you have the required cooking appliances and tables after all the requirements have been met you can open the restaurant the customers will flow in and you can watch this endless loop of staff serving the guests and new customers arriving over time at the end of may i took a chance and left my architecture job to work on shaft rpg full time i had savings that could last a few months but my plan was to do a kickstarter and hopefully raise enough money to fund the rest of development now this was a pretty risky move but at the same time i felt it was worth the risk and if it doesn't work out i could always just get a job again it was also at this time that nikita who is an illustration artist reached out to me and offered to create character portraits for the game she started by redrawing some of the early portraits i had like the android bubble tea girl made them much more unique and gave them way more personality she later helped with redrawing some of the food art as well as creating some stories and dialogues for the characters i thought the new characters were so interesting that i began to build environments and building designs around them i think it's always important to have some sort of external inspiration when doing design in this case designing buildings inspired by characters and their personalities could lead to some really unique results without these sources of inspiration the game could easily end up looking repetitive and lacking variety in june i began developing the hunting and gathering system the main challenge with the hunting system was rigging the bow animations and figuring out how to rotate the bow 360 degrees while having animations that match the bow it took a while to implement but eventually we finished a huntable bore and some vegetation that you can harvest for various fruits and vegetables after that was complete a simple dialogue system was also implemented to work with the new npc portraits this will be something we come back to later since this dialog interface will play a pretty important part in the game in august i began the task of overhauling a lot of the old pixel art starting with the restaurant and working my way to retrying the entire town of white ash harbor everything was redesigned and redrawn to feature cleaner pixel art and a better color palette one thing i really focused on this time was creating a lot of animated signs which gives more life to a scene and also gives off a nice sci-fi vibe finally some weather and water lines created from the unity particle system were added to the game to this day one of my favorite areas in the game is the docks area places like this are usually a fun place to be even in real life in this case the orange promenade against the blue water backdrop creates a nice color palette and the lit signs and billboards look great during daytime or night time to give the npcs walking around a livelier feeling a chat box system was implemented so they will say random things as they are walking by the same system was also applied to chefs and waiters as well again to give the game more life since it wouldn't make sense if you have all these characters walking around but they are silent all the time by october of 2021 a lot of the game's user interfaces were redesigned and the build mode featured a click and drag system versus the old text scrolling system which is a lot more user friendly and this is something i learned after designing some uis and looking at ui systems of other games wherever possible you want to use images and icons rather than text it makes the ui more interactive and fun to use because you won't need to read much additionally you don't have to translate all that text if you want to make the game for multiple languages just something to keep in mind if you ever have to design your own ui systems by november the centerpiece of white ash harbor the famous bath house was completed it's a major tourist attraction and draws a lot of tourists to come and visit this relatively small seaside town it's also an important part of shaft rpg's main story and after completing this bath house it really began to feel like i was settling in on a pixel art style as well as a design style for the game world we did a kickstarter for a chef rpg in november and we were very fortunate that it raised enough money to allow me to work on a game full time for the next two years and also to pay contractors to create music and to improve certain art assets like overhauling the character animations this was also a time where i started to feel a lot of burnouts not really from the workload of making the game but rather from all the business and marketing work associated with kickstarter one example is all the graphic design and written work required for marketing and making the kickstarter pages and updates as weird as it sounds i actually hate doing graphic design it's something i never really enjoyed whether for making architecture portfolios or making presentation slides i love making all the arts but the moment i have to put the art on organized panels and add text to accompany it i tire out super quickly looking back i probably could have just paid someone else to do it and they would have done a much better job than i did after taking a break and recovering i jumped right back to work in january and began creating some new maps including expanding the cave system for the past few months after the kickstarter i've spent a lot of time on the art side of things improving old maps and making new ones recently our new artist clements delivered some great new character animations i think the characters look cuter and the animations are a lot more fluid than what i had made previously there's still a couple more animations we will be adding in the coming months to deal with tools and activities we also added shaders to all of the clothing and hairs so that they can change colors through script and i don't need to manually import the animations for every color this will give us a lot more variety to the character appearances moving forward in the past couple months a couple more systems were added to the game including a system for hiring and organizing chefs and waiters so you can move them around between your different restaurants all of the chefs and waiters have their own unique stats that you can level over time the more services they complete sometimes when you're lucky an epic or legendary staff member might pop up for you to hire and finally a schedule system was created so you can now set restaurant open and close times for the times where you want the restaurant to stay open while you are in a different location so that's where we are now it's been an incredible journey working on this game and we really appreciate all the support and helpful feedback it adds an extra layer of pressure but at the same time it will result in a better game there's definitely still a long way to go before this can be considered a proper game but i think it's going in a good direction so far i wish i did a better job of archiving the old footage and old builds of the game since i have the habit of deleting old stuff i don't need anymore it would be nice to have a dev diary of this whole process on the chef rpg website but that's a problem for the future me be sure to wish list chef rpg if you are interested in the game i'll be back with some devlog videos to go more in depth into what we've worked on over the past couple months so stay tuned thanks for watching and see you next time

Channel: Pixel Architect

Views: 682,362

Keywords: Game development, Gamedev, Devlog, Indie Game, Stardew valley, Animal Crossing, Eastward, Terraria, Design, Architecture, Pixel Art

Id: zatQG96LYQA

Length: 16min 33sec (993 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 30 2022