Cook Serve Forever
There is nothing wrong with an inherently difficult game. It’s what I’ve built my entire career on, in fact. But the degree to which I was shutting out players from enjoying our games simply due to our staggering difficulty didn’t become apparent until it was too late—and the features we put in to make our games more accessible didn’t address inherent issues. But with new games comes the new opportunity to try again and get it right.
My name is David Galindo, creator of the Cook, Serve, Delicious! series and creative director for Cook Serve Forever, the next game in our seemingly never-ending quest to create the most engaging cooking games ever. While the first Cook, Serve, Delicious! game had an Extreme difficulty mode and was quite challenging towards the end, it wasn’t until the second game that we prided on having a notoriously difficult gameplay experience, and leaned into it heavily with “Prepare to Dine” imagery and images of chefs cooking angrily, tired and exhausted.
There were plenty of other games out there if you wanted an easier time. We weren’t interested in that. Based on the Steam refund data of those who gave a reason for their return, 16 percent of people refunding Cook, Serve, Delicious! 2!! did so due to the game being too difficult, jumping to 20 percent for Cook, Serve, Delicious! 3?!, despite the fact that we did have easier modes to choose from to help scale down the difficulty.
Today I’m going to dig into why our difficulty selections didn’t really work in CSD 2/3 and what we plan on doing for Cook Serve Forever. There are two key areas I’ll be really focusing in on today: the visual makeup of the UI for the games, and our difficulty options that were born out of necessity rather than an inherent
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