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How Overcooked 2 turns up the heat in the co-op kitchen
One of the biggest surprises at E3 was the Overcooked 2 announcement. With all-new mechanics, level designs and ways to destroy relationships, we sat down with Ghost Town Games to find out more.
Overcooked, when played with a few friends, is one of the most frustratingly fun experiences you can have while gaming. When you’re not running around barely keeping the kitchen from going up in flames, you’ll be screaming at your co-op partner after they've fallen into the water with a full pot of soup for the third time.
Ghost Town Games are back again with another slate of challenges that will drive you to the brink of culinary insanity. The UK-based two-man development team have upped the ante for Overcooked 2, aided by the experience of creating the first game and a publisher helping them out with the finer details.
Get a taste of what Overcooked 2 has in store:
“We had a laundry list of awesome ideas with the first game that we had to throw out due to both time and money,” said Phil Duncan, one member of Ghost Town Games. “This time around we’ve got new things like dynamic levels where recipes change halfway through. We’ve got one level where a hot-air balloon restaurant crashes into another restaurant and you go from making salad to sushi.”
Duncan and his development partner Oli DeVine are no longer on their own, as they were for the first game. Instead, they’ve partnered with Team17 to offer more features, including online play and bigger, more challenging levels. It was easier this time around as well, the duo finished the original game in 2016 and worked on additional content and porting the game for around a year, before spending the rest of that time on the sequel.
“We spent a lot longer working on the original, we didn’t know what we were doing at some points,” DeVine said. “We actually built a larger city area around the levels where you cook on the street to deal with some issues, it was a waste of time in hindsight. It was a waste of time and we didn’t run into issues like that before.”
Learning from the first time in the kitchen
Even though Overcooked was a huge amount of fun, Duncan and DeVine didn’t want to do more of the same. They wanted to take lessons learned from making and watching people play the first game and build on them. “We wanted to change the way people played, get them more involved,” Duncan said, “We had a design philosophy of building levels around a single element, whether it be separating players, creating a pinch point, or something like that.”
The duo noticed issues as they watched people play; such as how some players wouldn’t have enough to do when the map separated teams into different sections. To remedy this they added a throwing mechanic so players could toss ingredients, pots, and dishes across the map. It’s a solution that fixed that issue while also encouraging faster-paced cooperative play. Why carry something around when you can chuck it across the map?
“We thought of it as psychological experimentation,” DeVine laughed. “We studied the different ways a team would approach a level, it helped us see what worked and what didn’t.”
Ghost Town Games took a similar approach to creating new recipes for Overcooked 2. The first game featured simple dishes like burgers, pizza, fish and chips, and everyone's favorite onion soup made with nothing but onions. “We boiled down recipes into their finest form to keep things simple,” DeVine said. “We wanted meals that had distinct steps, like chopping ingredients before throwing them in a pot.”
That same philosophy was applied to dishes in the second game, with new recipes like sushi and salad, both with the same clear, distinct directions that make orders easy to tackle quickly as chaos erupts around you.
Overcooked 2 is exploring all-new kitchen landscapes
© Ghost Town Games
Cooking things up online
While Overcooked is all about experiencing fire and food next to your pals on the couch, Duncan and DeVine wanted to take the multiplayer fun even further by adding online play to the mix. They couldn’t do it with the first game, since they didn’t have the experience coding for netplay, but Team17 helped fill in the gaps there.
“After we put out the first game, we got a lot of messages from people who wanted to play with their friends and family overseas,” DeVine said. “It’s funny since so many publishers told us that local co-op wouldn’t even work when we were working on Overcooked, and now we’re here putting in online play after so much success with couch play.”
Team17 helped with more than just online, a team of 15 additional developers helped polish a number of smaller elements to make Overcooked 2 a more well-rounded game. They’ve added coloured icons below each character to help players distinguish their cook among the madness. They’ve also made overworld navigation extra charming by having the bus in which you drive around transform as it visits different environments.
“This sequel started because of the success of the first game,” DeVine said. “But we knew we couldn’t do the online play on our own, so we partnered with Team17 to make a bigger sequel. It was also much easier to do since we'd learned from our time on the original game and all its DLC.”
It’s not illegal to cook up high
© Ghost Town Games
New content for new cooks
Overcooked isn’t just a blast because you need to run a disastrous restaurant service in the middle of a volcano, it’s a blast because you can do all that as a reindeer and his sentient box friend. The sequel introduces a whole raft of new characters that for people to play.
Some new ones include an alien, unicorn, monkey, calico cat and eagle – all of whom are available exclusively through pre-orders. The progression in the new game is also different, your magic school bus will be headed through graveyards, castles, and blimps as well as some familiar kitchen environments.
Ghost Town Games have spent over a year building on the foundation of the first game, improving elements where they could, while adding new features that will hopefully make Overcooked 2 an experience that rivals it’s predecessor. We’ll find out if they've achieved that soon enough: Overcooked 2 is hitting Nintendo Switch, Xbox One, PS4, and Steam on August 7. It’s also slated for a physical release on Nintendo Switch.
“This experience has been so much different than our first time around,” Duncan said. “But in the end we want people to see what we’ve done with this new game and know that we’ve been listening, and we’re thankful.”
