One year ago, if you told me I would have the opportunity to lead a project about a married couple fighting over who is going to cook dinner, I would have not believed you. Yet, here we are, at the end of 2022 releasing a game that we managed to complete in two months.

The idea stemmed from a regular occurance I have with my partner: we can never decide on who is going to make/choose what we will have for dinner. It is always a back and forth of 'It's your turn to choose!' or 'We can do whatever you want.' This is natural in any relationship, and was therefore hyperbolised and became the main idea for our game.

Luckily for me, the idea was formed  before  I knew about Yuri Jam, and upon scrolling through itch.io, riding a high of finishing four jams in the last few months, I stumbled upon Yuir Jam and set out to build a team who could contribute to this silly idea. 

First, let's meet the characters.  The stars of the game are Beatriz and Mio. Beatriz is a veggie umami chef who has heavy attacks that can cause devastating damage,, Her wife Mio is an aroma- pattiserie baker, who is a lot quicker and uses more utensils with her attacks. The girls were designed to be a classic 'butch and femme' combo. 

Now before the jam started, I invested in a UDEMY course to learn how to make a fighting game in Unity, as a failsafe in case I wasn't able to find a programmer. The course was incredibly helpful and acted as a guide as to what was needed to actually make the game...and It was  way  more than what I was expecting.

TIP: If you're new to game developent, DON'T DO A FIGHTING GAME AS YOUR FIRST GAME!!!

Each character has her own capsule colliders, rigidbodies, multiple scripts that talk to each other, box collidors to stop them from walking through each other, variables for them to slide across the screen after hits, animation trees with dozens of branches.

Our inspiration was the mother of all fighting games,  Street Fighter.  However, we also had a look at  Skull Girls , Persona 4 Arena, Smash Brothers  and more to understand how the game will function. Lucky for us, our team was able to take certain elements from each game and flavour it with our individual taste to produce this colourful, unique and fun game.

Now, as much as I enjoy working on visual novels, I was getting rather fatigued of developing them, and really wanted to put my very basic Unity skills to the test.

So, I spoke to Noah, who I had worked with before and been friends with for a long time, to be the game designer. He is able to make unity do things I couldn't even imagine, and I have nothing but respect for him. He also developed the audio manager we ended up using and took the time to explain to me how to use it. 

Aqua is someone who I have worked with in the past and is always a joy. Her animations were all  hand drawn . She literally drew each frame you see the girls attack. She also animated the main menu and designed the victory screens. Aqua never fails to impress me with her talents and I never tire of working with her.

Jen is also an artist I have worked with in the past and was able to make the opening comic, character select screen and UI elements while dealing with technical issues. She is a trooper and I cannot thank her enough for her contribution. her kitchen timer idea is amazing and everytime I see it, I smile.

It was wonderful to have a voice actor on board to give our characters some depth and dimension.  Abby was kind enough to lend her voice acting talents and was able to voice  both  Beatriz and Mio, but you really couldn't tell it's the same person! She was able to work autonomously and deliver some killer lines. 

Sunny was a late addition to the team, but has been a tremendous help. Their programming skills are incredible and they went above and beyond to make this game smooth and functional. They also made the scripts so much easier to understand and were able to fix bugs at lightning speed.

As for me, I composed 5 tracks for this game, as well as designed over 30 sounds effects for the moves, reactions and ui. I used a mixture of score writing the orchestral parts, and playing in my own bass parts and programming the drums. Everything was composed, recorded and mixed in Pro Tools. 

I also engineered Abby's voice lines, and didn't end up altering much aside from the regular de-noising, EQ, de-essing and de-ploser. The compression was rather light, but I did have to do a little gainstaging to make sure all the lines were the same.

I also recruited my friend Charlie to shred some guitar over the tracks, and he never dissapoints. Thade, my other friend, was able to assist me in sound design by craeting various sounds at the recording studio. 

Upon reflection, I think we worked extremely well as a team. There was never a need to 'force' Ideas out and the flow was smooth. In hindsight, I would have preferred to be on the same page with everyone a bit more, because there were a few changes made the ended up breaking the game in some points that we needed to backtrack on a realise what broke what. we strayed from the UDEMY course and got a bit lost, but we were able to pull through and create the game you're playing.

We did also stray from the Hack n' Plan we created, and everyone ended up working on different jobs because of this. Now this isn't a bad thing at all, with the majority of us tweeking the code and testing, we were able to have this project worked on basically 24/7, but there were times where the tweeking would end up breaking an animation or a sound effect and no one was told. 

Overall, while the development of You're Cookin' Good Lookin'! was a little anxious for me, the team was incredible and we managed to pull off a fantastic game. I would love to develop it more in 2023, maybe add in some more stages and build a roster (even more chefs and bakers!!) I would also love to explore the lore of Beatriz and Mio some more. Perhaps there can be a prequel where they are getting ingredients for each other, or an actual cooking game! The world is our oyster afterall. 

Please enjoy this quick, quirky and colorful game and let us know what you think of it in the comment section!

Yours,
Dom.