When the first Overcooked! came out in 2016, it was a breath of fresh air amongst a sea of multiplayer games that mostly tasked players with butting heads on a violent battlefield. In Overcooked!, the kitchen is your warzone. Players have to work together to prepare different recipes under a time limit and adapt to its many levels’ devious obstacles. It rejuvenated the couch co-op genre, causing friends and family to erupt in either laughter or tears in their living room, depending on if they had managed to get that last burger out the door or not.
It also happens to be a game developed solely by two people: Phil Duncan and Oli De Vine, a.k.a. Ghost Town Games. This time around, however, Ghost Town got help from Team17 Digital, which has allowed them to increase the scope of the game and include a wide variety of mechanics that were previously impossible for them to implement on their own.
“As a two-person studio there was always a limit on the content we could add to the game, so it was really great to get the opportunity to create a sequel where we could add all the features which didn't make it into the first game while addressing all the requests from fans of the first,” Duncan said.
One of these major features is online multiplayer. “After the success of the first game, we got so many messages from players saying they wished they could play with their friends or family who lived overseas,” Duncan explained. “When we got the opportunity to work on a sequel, we knew that was one of the features we needed to include.”
Online multiplayer is a big deal for the game. If you’ve ever played Overcooked! with friends before, then you know that it very quickly reveals a lot about a person — whether they’re the kind of player who will immediately dole out instructions to their teammates, the kind of player who prefers to do things their own way, or the kind of player who always forgets about a burner and routinely starts kitchen fires. If you want an efficient kitchen, you’ve got to have good chemistry — and online multiplayer might help players connect with the teammates they need to succeed.
With additional help from Team17, Ghost Town was able to include a number of other features that had been on their mind during the development of the first game. One of these features is dynamic kitchens, manic levels that shift gears during the middle and ask players to prepare a completely new recipe. “Dynamic kitchens were something we experimented with in the final level of Overcooked! 1 which we wanted to bring into the main game,” Duncan said.
Another novel mechanic is throwing ingredients across the kitchen to other players. “Throwing was a prototype we'd kicked around but never quite been able to nail down until we started working with Team17 and found a really nice way to make it work,” Duncan said. “It really was a case of building on the ideas and mechanics of the first game while ironing out some of the creases as we went.”
The recipe system has also been reworked to address player behavior that the developers had observed during the run of the previous game. “We noticed a lot of players were ignoring more complex recipes, because recipes with less ingredients were quicker to produce and achieved the same score,” Duncan explained. “Now in Overcooked! 2, more complex recipes achieve higher scores, but we also add a combo meter which rewards players for delivering recipes in the order that they arrive.” Players can expect new recipes — as well as new playable chefs — to make their debut in Overcooked! 2.
Duncan noted that many of these new developments are owed in large part to Ghost Town’s collaboration with Team17. “Being able to share the workload with a larger team has been really rewarding,” he said. “Whereas, before, Oli and I would have to switch between a number of different roles every day, suddenly we were free to focus on the levels’ designs or the mechanics, etc. Having a dedicated art team or audio team means they're not having to cut as many corners and can deliver work of a much higher standard than we ever could have done on our own.”
Even now, Overcooked! 2 remains an anomaly in the contemporary gaming landscape. To Ghost Town Games, this is something to celebrate. “I've always preferred the experience of taking on a game with a friend rather than competing against them, and sadly that's something which is very much in the minority in modern games,” Duncan said. “My hope for the game is that it captures some of the magic I felt as a gamer playing co-op games with my brothers when I was growing up.”
The massive success of the first Overcooked! can attest to that. It’s something every household should have, particularly for when having people over who aren’t necessarily gamers. “I think the thing we're proudest of is when we get emails from people saying, ‘My partner doesn't normally play games with me. But we've been playing through Overcooked! together, and we love it!’” Duncan said. “That's something we definitely want to develop when moving forward as a studio.”