ETAO PODCAST, EPISODE 120.
At midnight tonight, David Galindo and his team are surprise-releasing ChefSquad, a collaborative cooking game that can only be played on Twitch. “Wait, what?” you might reasonably ask—and by way of answering you there, David has kindly stopped by to give us the scoop on this weird, joyful, formally inventive, genuinely new creation.
ChefSquad shares some DNA with David’s Cook! Serve! Delicious! trilogy, but as much as it’s a spin-off of those, it’s also a foil to other stream-only games—games that, in David’s view, pretty fundamentally misunderstand the technical peculiarities and cultural priorities of Twitch.
What does it mean for a game to be built not just for streaming but on the relationship between streamers and their audiences? In asking that, we also ask what kinds of games are better suited for a stream-centric media ecosystem in the first place, how developers can try and thrive in that brave new world, and how to even talk about the value of games nowadays.
You can play ChefSquad on Twitch.
If you’re a streamer, you can download the game for free on Steam and Itch.
And don’t you dare forget the Cook! Serve! Delicious! trilogy.
You can also follow David on Twitter.
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• David talked more about the Cook! Serve! Delicious! trilogy last time he was on the show.
• That game about a starship bridge is Artemis.
• Here are WhatifJulia’s Twitch and Twitter.
• It does seem like The Bell Is Right is all but lost to time, sadly.
• For those who haven’t heard about hate raids, or the massive Twitch leak.
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“All The People Say (Season 4)” by Carpe Demon.
“ChefSquad” and “Intermission” from the ChefSquad OST by Jonathan Greer.
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Logo by Aaron Perry-Zucker, using Icons by by Llisole, Dávid Gladiš, Atif Arshad, Daniel Nochta, Mike Rowe, Jakub Čaja, Raji Purcell and IconsGhost from the Noun Project.
Everybody's Talking at Once 