Game News Report: Pizza Bandit – Cooking Up a Storm in the Gaming World
The Pizza Bandit Experience
Hey gamers! Have you ever dreamed of becoming a master chef in the virtual world? Well, get ready to put on your apron and step into the fast-paced kitchen of Pizza Bandit! In this thrilling cooking game, players will embark on a culinary journey like no other. From whipping up pizzas to grilling, flipping, and slicing, Pizza Bandit offers a variety of cooking challenges that will test your skills and creativity.
Just like in Overcooked, where teamwork and communication are key to success, Pizza Bandit will have you working alongside your friends to deliver mouth-watering dishes in record time. So gather your squad, sharpen your knives, and get ready to conquer the kitchen!
Matt: You were talking about the demo on the Steam deck earlier, how at first it didn’t want to cooperate with it, but then an update allowed it to play better. Was that partially because of a change in the frame rate where steam decks have been notorious for dropping the refresh rate?
Aron Koh: I think two things. One, in terms of control, we’ve put in a lot of work on the controller. And as a Korean, a lot of my friends in Korea only, I think less than my 10% actually use controllers. They’re all keyboard and mouse players, so we didn’t know how to make a good experience, but through going through a lot of different shows like PAX West and Level Up and PAX East, we had a lot of feedback from them.
Inspiration & Potential Easter Eggs
Matt: Obviously with cooking games, but bounty hunter / 3D duty shooters, there’s always inspiration from other games. Have you reached out to any other studios about collaborating like, hey, could we borrow a character for an Easter egg or could we have a character inspired by this as a nice little nod?
Aron Koh: I kind of am looking forward to it, we have a lot of stuff to do internally to clean up and get the basic content in there, but we’ve seen a lot of comments and some of the videos saying that there’s got to be Pizza tower arcade game, or there’s a lot of comments on some of the inspiration that we should take from other games. So we would love to, we just have to get the stuff done on our side to actually get the collaboration going. So getting around to that.
Why a Shooter?
Matt: Yeah, Indie Studios are typically easy to work with. You were talking about how the team is basically from a whole bunch of different studios and how but most of you guys do not have the first-person or third-person shooter aspect. What made the team really want to go into that between the two games, Rift Sweepers, and then Pizza Bandit?
Aron Koh: When we moved here in 2018, I was close friends with all of these guys when they founded the studio, but I joined early last year, at that time, I think we made RPGs, but it was always towards action RPGs. So we made a mobile action RPG in, I think we launched in 2019.
It didn’t do well, but right around that time, one of the big IP action, IP action cartoons, well Manga, I would say IP from Japan knocked on our doors and we started working on that project, but that one didn’t get released to the publisher Flash for business reasons.
But after that, we’re like, we really got to do work on some action games. But our director in charge who’s leading the production of this game is super into Shooters, and I think he’s the one who pushed the most. And this one day he just came back with, Hey, if we don’t know what we’re going to do, can we do this? And he pulled out a prototype and got the team to play it, and they’re like, oh, this is looking good. And with that prototype, we were able to get a little funding after a G-Star, which it’s just one of the big game shows in Korea. We put that prototype out there and we got funding from it.
We’re on the verge of a life-and-death situation for the studio running out of money. But this thing just got us funded, so we’re like, yeah, let’s really go for it. Great job. Our director’s name is Shego, and he is pulling the wheel on this one. Oh, by the way, our CEO used to be, I mean, we’ve been around for a long time and our CEO used to be a Ranker in Rainbow Six, and this is a long time ago. So we do enjoy a lot of shooter games.