Deep Dive: Balancing the authentic culinary experience with Chef Life: A Restaurant Simulator

gamedeveloper.com:

Game Developer Deep Dives are an ongoing series with the goal of shedding light on specific design, art, or technical features within a video game in order to show how seemingly simple, fundamental design decisions aren't really that simple at all.

Earlier installments cover topics such as lessons learned from ten years of development with Ingress engineering director Michael Romero, how legendary Dwarf Fortress programmer Tarn Adams updated the game for its official Steam release, and how architect and solo developer Jack Strait made an entire horror game in PowerPoint.

In this edition, Cyanide Studio project manager Diane Quenet and lead game designer Antoine Cazayus tell us how they found the right balance between authentic and streamlined experiences in their cooking sim Chef Life: A Restaurant Simulator.

Hello everybody! This is a "four hands" presentation: project manager Diane Quenet and lead game designer Antoine Cazayus. We work at Cyanide Studio, and we are behind code name "Arrabbiata" or, rather, Chef Life: A Restaurant Simulator.

When Nacon suggested that we work on a restaurant simulator, we were immediately excited by the idea! We had just finished Call of Cthulhu, a game with a dark and gloomy atmosphere, so a title with some color and a lighter tone in an area of interest to us was welcome. We are really excited as developers to be able to present certain aspects of the game.

We began by researching the restaurateur profession and how the culinary world is represented. We found plenty of depictions in the media, be it documentaries, cooking competitions, films, or anime, as well as mechanics in video games. If there are a few true-to-life depictions, such as the excellent film The Chef, most are very