One of the biggest changes to Cook, Serve, Delicious! 2!! is the way the game handles progression. In the first game, you would have to complete a series of objectives to make it to the next star. Theoretically it was supposed to have the player work for a number of days to attain all of the objectives in order to progress, but ultimately most players would complete all of the objectives in just three or four days, leaving the “20 days of service” progression left. A lot of people felt that this was a drag on the game, and I agree.

Progression in CSD 2 is handled in an entirely different way. You’re still upgrading your restaurant from zero stars to a five star Platinum restaurant, but now progression is handled thru a new element called YUM.



YUM stands for Your Universal Mastery. You earn it by completing a workday, making perfect orders, working extra shifts at other restaurants, and completing objectives. As you get better at the game, you earn YUM much faster, and eventually your YUM is high enough to get to the next star. If this sounds a lot like XP, you’re mostly right, but it is only used to gate progress. Cash you’ve earned from your restaurant and shift work is still needed to buy food upgrades and other items, as I still want the player to have total control over how they want to build their restaurant. With YUM you’re pretty much free to do whatever you like in the game, and earn progress towards finishing it. This is a much better way of handling it than the 20 required workdays!

With this new mechanic I’m going to be bringing back the Checklist from the first game, but with some important changes. First off, the checklist is now entirely optional, and completing objectives will result in bonus YUM. Another key change is that it’s entirely fluid and independent of star ranking. So if you complete the “20 perfect order combo” objective you get some bonus YUM, and that objective gets replaced with a “30x combo” goal for the next day. This also means bonus events like Iron Cook aren’t going to be required for progression, unlike the last game. If an Iron Cook event is too hard, simply pass on it for now and continue working on beating the game.

CSD 1′s checklist, which will be entirely revamped (and optional) in the sequel.





Stars are also adjusted a bit differently. It would typically take 4-5 hours between each star, but with the new YUM mechanic I wanted to reward players more frequently. So now stars are done in half-star progression, and the Platinum stars are built into the game as the final goal (rather than a bonus goal). This allows for 20 levels total, way more than the six in the last game, and you’ll get to those levels much faster than the 4-5 hours in the last game.





An example of the main menu info bar, which is still a work in progress, as well as some stuff blurred out that I haven’t talked about yet. :)





I want to stress that these YUM mechanics are going to be fair and done without any ideas of having future consumable microtransactions to, say, “double your YUM earnings with this bonus multiplier for $1.99!” or something. That is lame and stupid, and I don’t want any of that crap near my games. It’s simply a way of making game progression much, much better than the last game.

In a way this new YUM stuff also lets me make expansions much easier to do. For example, the Battle Kitchen expansion for the first game was completely separate from the main Campaign, but if I were to do something like that for CSD 2 I’d be able to tie it in via YUM earnings. It’s gonna be great!

Anyways if you have any feedback on how CSD 2 handles progression I’d love to hear it! I’ll be back later this month with another update, so stay delicious.