Two years ago, a Kickstarter campaign for a cooking competition game set in a fantasy world and called Battle Chef Brigade raised just over $100,000. With the game, which Trinket Studios developer Tom Eastman calls, "one part combo-based action hunting and one part puzzle-based action cooking," tentatively scheduled to release early next year, we've talked to Eastman about how it came to be.
Eastman met his partners at Trinket Studios, Eric Huang and Ben Perez, when they all worked at Wideload games. "We left Wideload/Disney creatively frustrated and excited to make 'small games with big character',! he says, "which worked out extremely well for our first two games. Those two mobile games, Color Sheep and Orion's Forge, had shockingly short but very fun development cycles."
After releasing those two games, however, the team had trouble coming up with an idea for their next project. Until, that is, one fateful day when they watched Food Network programming over lunch. "It was an instant realization that cooking games have yet to capture the frantic pace and improvisational skills seen on cooking competition shows," says Eastman. "From there, mixing in fantasy was a clear next step, partially to enrich the setting but also to get away from standard fare and expected recipes."

Iron Chef's humor and Chopped's pace are quoted by Eastman as two key inspirations for Battle Chef Brigade, but they didn't take inspiration solely ...