When I go to events, I know what to expect. I already have a list of games I intend to check out, and for the most part, I’m normally pretty good at identifying which titles will be my cup of tea. But there’s always something that comes along and surprises me, either something I signed up for not thinking I’d really jam with it or something entirely unexpected that I didn’t intend to play. AtWASD, that game was Gladieaters.
While waiting to play another game, an enthusiastic person in an apron beckoned me to their booth. As we watch someone trying to slice up some pixel art eggs, Oliver Georgallis, the lead producer of Gladieaters, explains the premise to me. You pick a chef, prepare the food mini-game style within a time limit, and then the meal you make becomes little food-themed monsters you battle another chef with. I was immediately sold.
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Georgallis tells me the idea for Gladieaters was a happy accident. He was speaking to a friend about how he wished he could go back in time and create the first creature collector game. His friend Tommy, who had not been listening to him properly, replied by saying he should make a cooking game, and in the confusion, the idea for Gladieaters was born.
Georgallis also tells me he and his partner are both chefs, though interestingly, this came after they cooked up the idea for Gladieaters, “Funnily enough, I got into the culinary sphere after Gladieaters, as an idea, had developed. Training in culinary arts and being around chefs really helped us flesh out the combat chef characters. We better understood what they’d talk about, what they’d be interested in, as well as what stories we’d like to tell with them. I couldn’t confidently write a fictional chef character before I knew what a cartouche was.”
You choose from seven different chefs when you play Gladieaters, and each has their own speciality that dictates what kind of food monsters you may whip up in the kitchen. Georgallis explains they wanted the chefs to reflect the different themes of the culinary world and the place that food holds in our lives.
“A key theme for Eggie is the place that food holds in the family, being both a manifestation of heritage and a bonding experience. Their opposite, Diane, takes up the role of toxic culture in the cooking world - those who see cooking as an opportunity to conquer the world.
“Other chefs were inspired by narratives around food eating. Loga suffers from a debilitating immune disorder that he was able to overcome by eating exclusively raw vegan foods. He now shows up at the CALoseum to bring others into his dietary belief. But other chefs question whether his diet should be recommended with such absolutism.”
When I played, Georgallis recommended I choose Eggie, so I was boiling eggs, peeling them, slicing them, and, unfortunately, not cooking them particularly well. Despite my terrible culinary skills, I had a decent enough team to defeat my opponent. As you cook, you must decide whether to keep evolving your creature by how you prepare it. You can have a dough creature, turn it into a bread creature, or slice it for a bread slice creature, then toast it… you get the idea.
“When it came to deciding which food to put in the game and which evolutionary line they’d have, we had to keep in mind the building nature of the minigames,” Georgallis tells me. “Whatever food we wanted to put in, such as an omelette, we needed to remember all the minigame steps that lead up to that food and how with limited time the player could be stopped at any point of the cooking process. In the case of omelette, we’d need to have an egg cracking minigame - so a raw egg Gladieater, then a whisking minigame — so a whisked egg Gladieater.”
The team originally structured the Gladieaters around three food types: eggs, pastries, and vegetables, with ideas in mind of final stage creatures they had to get to, such as Chocolate Cake and Ratatouille. Then they began to mix the food types to combine vegetables and eggs to get Shakshouka or combine pastries and vegetables to get Avocado Toast.
Georgallis tells me he spent two weeks in a haze of creating 50 Gladieaters designs in a sketchbook. Later in the design process, he realised that not all the food had to be inspired by a living creature, so the Cake is based on a growing castle with tentacles to push it around and castle-window eyes. However, his first design remains his favourite, “The peeled boiled egg. A little dude coming out of his shell with thick rhino legs and an awkward smile. I’m still rooting for them to be the game’s mascot, but it seems bread loaf is taking over.”
The idea of mixing minigame elements with monster battling is surprising, and yet it works incredibly well. Georgallis tells me that Cult of the Lamb’s approach to merging two seemingly polar opposite types of gameplay that complemented each other was a “massive cornerstone” for the team design-wise. Darkest Dungeon 2 simplifying much of its previous gameplay was another key inspiration and that Red Hook’s ‘left of centre’ design for creatures and characters was another takeaway for the team.
Georgallis tells me the combination felt like a natural extension of the game’s core concept — cooking up creatures. “We’ve tried to play off the respective weaknesses of both genres with the strengths of the other. Cooking games generally lack depth, and your food doesn’t have a purpose — turn-based tactics add that depth and your food’s purpose is to be the best food creature for your fight.
“A weakness of turn-based tactics is that oftentimes some creatures or characters overpower others, or everything has the same power so nothing feels interesting. With the time limit on how long you have to cook your team, we make strong creatures take longer to cook and weak creatures quicker to cook. The player gets to decide if they want more weaker creatures or fewer stronger ones. This allows both strong and weak creatures to exist and both to be competitive.”
I left WASD already eager to play Gladieaters again, as rather fittingly, it’s incredibly moreish. While I only got to check out the core gameplay elements, Georgallis promises there is more than meets the eye to Gladieaters when it comes to the characters and narrative, “I think players will find the depth of the strategy and narrative elements surprising. We don’t exactly lead by talking about our fragmented storytelling, but we’ve put a lot of time into it, and I hope players enjoy learning more about the chefs.”
Gladieaters will develop free, long-term updates introducing more food, such as the Halloween Pumpkin Pie Gladieater. In the run-up to the launch, the team will also be hosting design events via their social media channels to get the community involved, with the best idea being added to the game. Gladieaters will launch next year andcan be wishlisted on Steam here. You can also check outthe official website hereandthe official Discord.
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