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Overcooked: Special Edition devs talk about building a deeply cooperative experience
Coming from Phil Duncan, Design Director and cofounder of Ghost Town Games...
A lot of games seem to add ‘co-op mode' as an afterthought. We'd played lots of games where co-op simply meant two avatars and twice as many enemies, and they almost always devolved into a race to see who could kill the next enemy or grab the next loot drop.
With Overcooked we wanted to make a game where cooperation was a central pillar, a game which was much more focused on how a team works together rather than simply adding more players to a single player experience.
I want to talk through the development process for the game, calling out some of the key decisions we made and the challenges we faced developing a game which actually required players to cooperate.