Hey Chefs! I’m Ryan Matejka (Bluesky[bsky.app] | Instagram[www.instagram.com] | Substack[scrawlthroughthevoid.substack.com]), Co-Writer of Cook Serve Forever. As David recently announced, you won’t have to wait much longer to experience the full game and story of Cook Serve Forever in all its redesigned beauty! That’s awesome for everyone, including me, because I started work on the story with Co-Writer Nicholas Kraak all the way back in 2021 and I am dying to talk to everyone about it.

One of my favorite things about peeking behind the scenes at any work of art is learning just how different everything could have been – Back to the Future could have used a refrigerator and nuclear explosion to travel through time instead of a DeLorian, Homer Simpson could have secretly been Krusty the Clown, and Bioshock Infinite could have delivered on the conflicting promises of its first trailers.

So I’m going to share with you two of the biggest things that could have been different about the story in Cook Serve Forever, why they were considered, and why they ultimately ended up on the cutting room floor.


Nori and Brie Almost Weren’t Partners

Nori and Brie’s relationship and playful banter are a huge part of Cook Serve Forever, contributing to the tone of the game and providing an emotional anchor for players as the story unfolds. However, early story outlines gave them a completely different dynamic.

Once we determined that Cook Serve Forever would have a voiced protagonist, we knew they’d need someone to talk to. We made a list of the traits this person would need to have both from a gameplay perspective (they should cheer the player on like Whisk does in Cook, Serve, Delicious! 3?!) and from a storytelling perspective (they should balance out Nori’s personality). The character we created from this list, and her relationship with Nori, was very different from what appears in the final game.

Initial story outlines featured a Nori who lived by herself in Moraine on the edge of the law. She would have worked at a SubSolutions food cart but gotten fired, then stolen the food cart and high-tailed it to Helianthus to become the best chef. There, she would have met an older and more laid-back woman named Brie – whereas Nori would be driven by ambition, this old, wise Brie would have no long-term goals and instead live in the moment, seizing opportunities and collecting experiences as they present themselves to her. Naturally, Lone Wanderer Brie would have seen Nori struggling with the food cart and offered to help. Lone Wanderer Brie would become a sort of big sister to Nori, imparting wisdom and guidance, and at the end of the game, Lone Wanderer Brie would walk off into the sunset in search of her next experience.

There are at least a dozen good reasons that we weren’t happy with this approach, many of which are probably obvious. One of the biggest problems with this version of Nori and Brie was that their connection didn’t feel very strong, which simply wasn’t very compelling. Furthermore, it would have been unnecessarily difficult to balance a story about Nori trying to be the best with a simultaneous story about her meeting and befriending a new person. It just became too complex.

Cook Serve Forever is supposed to be a feel-good game about cooking, and we decided that making Nori and Brie long-term partners from the start (and changing a bunch of other things about them) was the best way to reach that goal.


The Plot Almost Focused on a Recipe Book

Nori’s goal in Cook Serve Forever is the same as the player’s goal in the Cook, Serve, Delicious! Trilogy – she wants to achieve culinary greatness. After all, that worked for the previous games so why waste time trying to fix something that isn’t broken? Well, we were tired of doing the same thing over and over again, so we tried to fix it anyway by exploring alternate possible plotlines and character goals in the initial story pitches for Cook Serve Forever.

Once it was decided that the story would be more important in Cook Serve Forever than in our previous games, we were eager to take the narrative in a direction that wasn’t possible in the Cook, Serve, Delicious! series. We tried to think of every possible story that would make sense in a cooking game that didn’t involve the protagonist working their way up to winning a cooking competition – for example, we pitched the idea that Nori’s goal would be simply to get a spot at the local farmer’s market, or that she was drowning in debt and was trying to pay it off while on the run from a debt collector. None of these ideas lingered for very long, but there was one that felt like it was worth serious consideration.

We had already solidified the idea of the game starting with young Nori as a child living with her mom and then skipping ahead to Nori as an adult after her mother passed away. From there, we thought it would be cool for Nori to uncover her mother's handmade recipe book and take it with her to Helianthus, where she would be determined to make a living as a food cart chef while trying to learn and perfect all her mother's recipes. In the purest version of this idea, the player's sense of progress would come from slowly making their way through the recipe book and Nori's food cart would grow more famous with each recipe she learned. This fame would have naturally led her into cool opportunities as well as gotten her mixed up with some unsavory characters willing to steal the recipe book to further their own agendas.

While we liked the idea of the recipe book being a tool Nori could use to reconnect with her mother, we didn't like the implication that her (and the player's) success and skill were owed entirely to following someone else's recipes. We also ran into complications trying to figure out how the events of a plot centered around learning recipes from a book could be handled exclusively through food cart cooking gameplay – the story just didn’t align perfectly with the gameplay.

In the end, however, the scrapped recipe book-focused storyline proved to be a valuable step in the right direction. Without spoiling anything, it gave us a clearer idea of the type of character Nori needed to be, why she wanted so badly to be the best chef, and what the emotional core of the story was.

One of the most important parts of the writing process, whether during the earliest brainstorming session or while writing the final draft, is experimenting with different ideas. In our writing meetings, we held firm to the belief that there is no such thing as a bad idea. Sure, an idea might seem bad on the surface, but it can still give you a clearer picture of what a good idea might be, or some part of it may be worth using even if the whole of it doesn’t feel right. It is only by fearlessly exploring every inch of an idea that you can find out if it holds up to scrutiny or breaks under pressure. While the above ideas (and so many others I cannot talk about without spoilers) were interesting, we eventually moved on to ideas that we felt shaped a more compelling story full of humor, thrills, and heart.

I’m eager to find out if you agree!