Ready, steady, cook! Cheffing with purpose and positivity in Fruitbus

gamedeveloper.com:

This interview has been edited for clarity

Cooking is chaos. That's the singular truth at the heart of Fruitbus, the culinary adventure from Krillbite Studio that'll have players dishing out delicacies to cute critters as they breeze around a diverse archipelago in their trusty food truck.

Krillbite CEO Tobias Fossheim and gameplay programmer Jonas Odden explain the title is more systems-oriented than the studio's previous releases, and was born out of a desire to create something "gameplay-driven" after spending years working on narrative projects like Mosaic and Among the Sleep.

"During the pandemic, we wanted to explore something different, so we started thinking 'okay, what do we want to do?' It turns out we just wanted to have a lot of fun and laugh while we developed a game. We also wanted to serve smoothies to cute animals," says Fossheim. "Those were the two things, and it evolved from us wanting to create a smoothie stand to us wanting to put a food truck in an open world."

As the idea evolved, Krillbite committed to going the whole nine yards. If the team were going to make a cooking game, they were going to make a cooking game. "On a higher level our initial pitch hasn't really changed," says Odden. "We wanted you to feel like you're a chef in your kitchen." They explain that resulted in them implementing a tactile two-handed control scheme where players must use their two grabby appendages to interact with every single item in the kitchen (and even the the world beyond).

"We looked at games like Surgeon Simulator, where a lot of the fun actually comes from making a mess. Because in the kitchen–at least, in my own experience–I still make a mess even when I feel like I'm in control. We wanted to convey that