A player runs a salad restaurant powered by conveyor belts, which automatically transports the food from the kitchen and brings back dirty plates. Automatic mixers are chopping the ingredients for them.
Quick details
| Name | PlateUp! |
| Release Date | 2022 |
| Web | www.plateupgame.com |
| Formats | Singleplayer Local Co-op (1-4) Online Co-op (1-4) |
| Platforms | Windows |
| Developer | It's happening |
| Location | Oxford, UK |
| Contact | press@plateupgame.com |
Description
Hectic single-player and co-op restaurant management: cook and serve your dishes, upgrade and customise your restaurants, and expand your culinary kingdom with each procedurally-generated location. Work together to cook food, deal with customers, and serve drinks - or do it all yourself!
Take on the roles of cook, waiter, maitre d', entertainer and more as you and your friends create the restaurant of your dreams. Start from scratch each session and build your restaurant up with a variety of upgrades and unlocks, laying out your kitchen exactly how you want it. Tailor your customers' experience through your menu, decorations, and serving style, each with unique gameplay mechanics.
Prepare and serve a variety of dishes, including starters, mains, sides, desserts, and drinks. Get as many customers through the door as you can with fast-paced fast food, or make it fancy with gourmet 4-course dining experiences.
Features
Classic hectic co-op cooking action, with a variety of mains, sides, starters, desserts and drinks, each with unique mechanics
Handle the front-of-house, seating and serving customers, managing their patience and delivering them special treats
Create your own restaurant: curate your menu, buy appliances, arrange your layout, choose your style.
Expand your franchise after each session, tailoring your future sessions to how you want to play: from a high street cafe chain to bespoke dining experiences.
Two-button interaction gameplay so anyone can pick it up, but with depth to keep everyone interested.
Designed for co-op and singleplayer. Co-op via local (shared screen), online, and Remote Play Together.
Development
I've always loved playing local co-op games that could be picked up quickly by anyone; the quick fun of games like Overcooked. But I was always left wanting a deeper experience with greater replayability: a co-op game that allows us to play and progress in our own way, and develop our own group personality in the way that many modern singleplayer games do.
But any local co-op game has to be easy to pick up, avoid over-long sessions, and allow anyone to jump in and out as they like.
In January 2021, after a lockdown Christmas of late-night Unrailed! I started work on my own take; combining classic co-op cooking action with roguelite progression, I built a game that anyone could sit down and play, but with the longevity and depth to keep players coming back.
PlateUp! features quick, hectic gameplay with two-button interaction, allowing anyone to jump in to the game at any point and join their friends. Each session is driven by procedural generation and random upgrades, giving novelty, customization and meaningful choice.
Screenshots
Download all as .zip
Two players run a salad restaurant together. The queue outside in the rain is getting impatient. They have the charming decoration set and an office with a copy desk.
Players are voting on which of two choices of card they would like; every three in-game days, players are offered this choice, which increases the difficulty by adding a new layer of challenge. Each time, the left option represents a harder restaurant and the right option represents increased dish challenge (or, here, a new dish entirely)
In between gameplay days, players are able to rearrange everything in their restaurant and purchase new appliances. The red player is examining a research desk which they can buy, and the green player is holding the blueprint for a tray stand.
The players are given a new garage item, a dish washer. This item is provided as a crate that can be brought to one future run and is a reward for doing well in a run.
Three players are in the HQ "hub" screen. The green player is in the garage, looking at a crated Danger Hob; crates can be taken into the run to give a starting appliance. The red player is looking at the cards from a previous franchise, a breakfast restaurant called Has Beans, which they can continue on their next run. The blue player is choosing the map layout for the next run and is currently looking at the fixed-seed weekly run.
A player is creating a franchise from cards selected during a successful run. This means they have completed a run that went past 15 days, so can now choose three of their cards to bring into a future, more challenging run.
Steam
Anything else?
If there is anything missing, or you have any questions, please get in touch via press@plateupgame.com