Category: ID@Xbox

Sedap! A Culinary Adventure from School Project to Full-Fledged Game

Nadiyah Toi, Art Lead, kopiforge

Summary

Learn about the team’s journey in bringing the game to life.
Explore Southeast Asian cuisine and culture through iconic dishes.
Out now on PC and Xbox consoles.

Hey there! We’re kopiforge, a small indie team from Singapore, formed a mere three months after our graduation from university. What started as a small, single-level, proof of concept game for our graduation project eventually turned into our studio’s debut release – Sedap! A Culinary Adventure!

Our game Sedap! A Culinary Adventure is out now on Xbox Series X|S, and I’ll be sharing some of the trials and tribulations the team went through bringing the game to life.

What is Sedap! A Culinary Adventure?

Sedap! is a co-op, cooking-combat adventure all about preparing iconic, Southeast Asian dishes in a chaotic kitchen. Players take control of two best friends, Som and Gon, as they embark on an exciting culinary adventure to the unexplored, mysterious land of Khaya Island. As they travel, you’ll uncover more dishes, each a fantastical reimagination of real world cuisines from Southeast Asia, all requiring you to hunt monsters based on the region’s various mythologies for your ingredients.

New on the Scene, with Imposter Syndrome

As you can probably imagine, shipping a game with little to no experience was a gargantuan, borderline miraculous task. None of us had worked on a game from start to finish.

The answer to this problem was a generous amount of referencing various YouTube tutorials, numerous playtests with friends and acquaintances and consulting our peers in the industry, all of whom were incredibly supportive and hoping to see us succeed. Game design meetings were held constantly, as we ironed out how to make the game’s features fun and less repetitive. Feedback proved incredibly valuable in the early stages of production.

We made several blunders along the way, ranging from a bloated scope to having to discover the magic of game optimization together, but fortunately we managed to circumvent each and learn from each mistake we made.

Of course, we all fell victim to imposter syndrome at some point, wondering if the game was going to tank upon its release and everyone would point towards our combined inexperience. The solution here was simply to keep hyping up one another’s work, whilst keeping in mind the positive feedback we’d received from our trailers and playtests!

Finding Funding

Developing a game costs money, and unfortunately none of us came onto the project with an infinite amount of wealth to tide us over. Jumping into the industry with little experience also meant we had to learn about publishing and funding incredibly quickly, and we soon found ourselves navigating the battlefield which was pitching to publishers.

For the first few months of development, we balanced meetings, art production and programming alongside sending out more than a hundred emails to publishers, up till we had been rejected by most of them. Fortunately, we were able to sustain ourselves through the funding provided by the ID@Xbox program, and small investments from friends.

Just as we were nearing the end of our runway in late 2024, we signed with our publisher, Isolated Games! The entire process proved to be a learning experience, one that really got us acquainted with the industry and pitching as a whole.

Crafting the Game’s Menu

Perhaps the most fun challenge of all was figuring out the game’s menu and ingredients. Jay, the game’s director, and I both sat down for about six hours on a random Saturday afternoon and filled out a sheet with about 100 different dishes we’d like to see in the game. We tried to ensure each of the 11 countries in the region were equally represented, with each of their national dishes included– For instance, that’s Mohinga for Myanmar and Chicken Rice for Singapore!

Eventually, we had to bring that number down to 51 dishes for the final release (though we would have loved to include them all) and the process of cutting dishes proved to be a significant challenge. While some dishes were exceptionally unique, we still had to ensure that across the board, dishes could roughly share enough common ingredients between them– Eggs are common enough that they’re used in just about anything from Khao Jee to Mee Goreng. If a dish would require an entirely new ingredient being added just for it alone, it unfortunately had to be cut.

Some of the dishes I’m still mourning include Kaipen, Sambal Stingray and Nam Wan, all of which had concept art before they found themselves on the cutting room floor.

What’s Next?

With all that in mind, the team and I are incredibly proud of how far we’ve come as a studio and how much we’ve learnt together. None of us could have imagined starting a studio and shipping a title so soon after our respective graduations!

If the game sounds like it’s up your alley, then do support us by grabbing a copy of Sedap! A Culinary Adventure on the Xbox Series X|S!