Pizza Bandit interview

Sometimes you see a game and you go oh that looks fun what is it about? Earlier this month, JofSoft reached out to us to invite us to try out their latest demo of their upcoming game Pizza Bandit at PAX West. Sadly, due to some personal reasons and a conflict in schedule, we are unable to make it to PAX West this year, but we knew we had to share with you this game!

What the developers describe as a third-person shooter (Gears of War) mixed with Overcooked, Pizza Bandit takes players on a thrilling survival cooking experience across different times and locations. Pizza Bandit will be at booth #651 at PAX West and guests will be able to try out a four-person co-op experience. The new demo will show off two bounty missions, visual customization options, as well as new weapons and abilities; keep an eye out for the Pizza Slicer.

Despite being unable to play the demo at PAX West, we did however get the chance to try out a different version of the game while at home. At first, there was a bit of a learning curve with having to adapt to friendly fire, cook pizzas, and manage equipment, but by the second mission, we felt like we were pros. Because of this, we decided to increase the mission difficulty, and oh man were we not prepared for the chaos that ensued.

Enemies came at us faster and hit harder than before. The joyful shooting turned into chaotic commands while trying to manage pizza orders and defend the cooks. Despite this chaos, our group of cooking mercenaries had a comical time figuring out what we could or couldn’t get away with. Despite having only three missions readily available with others to unlock, we found ourselves playing for hours leveling up our weapons and gear.

Before we even got to try out the Pizza Bandit demo, we spoke with Jofsoft’s VP and Executive producer Aron Koh about Pizza Bandit and much more. Below is our interview with Aron Koh before showing off the game at PAX West 2024.

Matt from Nichegamer: So we’ve already been talking, but can you introduce yourself to those who don’t know you?

Aron Koh from JofSoft: Hi, my name’s Aron Koh. I am a VP at JofSoft, doing a lot of marketing and digital development stuff, but on this Pizza Bandit product, I am the Executive Producer and I try to put a lot of wisdom into our direction and the approach that we’re taking with the game.

Rift Sweepers to Pizza Bandi

Matt: Earlier we were talking about Rift Sweepers, and you were saying that it was too difficult for a lot of the average players. So when you ended up switching gears and starting to create Pizza Bandit, what kind of was the main inspiration for that? Was it somebody who secretly wanted to be a pizza shop owner in the studio or?

Aron Koh: Actually, so with Rift Sweepers, the style of action that we try to portray is still, I think in line with what we’re going for in this game. But there were a few elements in that game that really had a good impression on the audience. And those two are one pizza and two, the pizza-cooking mission. So we have the pizza, the drop pod coming down from the sky when you call your supply box is a pizza box with pizza, coke, and ammunition. And I think a lot of people enjoyed that.

We did have a ridiculous amount of damage for that thing, and you do get hit too. So we had a lot of negative comments on why the hell did I die after using it. But that element of pizza and the pizza cooking mission is very much more refined in the Pizza Bandit than the previous one. I think those were the key elements why we tried to keep that pizza element in the game from the get-go. And we tried to create everything around it.

So the story and how the pizza works and all that, and how everything looking in terms from the logo to everything, we were like, yeah, we got, we’re stripping out everything else, but we’re keeping it.

Matt: Okay, that makes sense. It’s still, I’m more asking what caused the collaboration, because like you said before, Rift Sweepers was a shooter. So what kind of pushed a team to be like, we do want to add this food element, or was it just,

Aron Koh: Oh, so after we decided to make it around pizza, we called a Pizza Bandit and we started going to the shows and showing it to showing it at Indie Festivals, PAX West, Level Up, we would notice. We didn’t really showcase our pizza mission that we knew that a lot of people liked. We tried to get the earlier missions tested with the players, but we did have a video going on a TV screen. And as I was talking to the players, I would look around every time to the aisle and every time there’s like 10 to 15 people gathered around the TV, it’s when they’re making pizza.

So the cooking really peaks for people. And that got us thinking internally like, Hey, we have a lot of these different types of missions, but everybody seems to like this one. Maybe we should try incorporating these food elements into it. And as we’re working on it, all the humor, all the funny stuff that comes out from each mission, it always gravitates towards cooking. So you know what, we’ve got to get this. This is so fun just in terms of making it, but also playing it too. So yeah, that’s why we’re trying to push ourselves to be a little bit like Overcooked plus third-person shooters.

Outsourcing/Collaboration

Matt: So now with us talking about it, earlier you said you guys were a smaller studio made up of six to eight people. Have you had to outsource any parts of the project? Like, oh, we need X, Y, Z thing. We may not have the knowledge, but somebody else might and just getting assistance through that way, or was it just more trial and error?

Aron Koh: So funny thing about our studio is we lacked some key talent, which is really, really painful for us. We don’t have an animator, so a lot of the small animation changes are Game Designer/Programmer/ Sound Designer also takes care of it. So we do a lot of, we try to wear different hats and try to learn different talents, but for the key stuff, we do outsource.

There are a few guys up in Canada that I used to work with. He was my co-founder in another mobile studio that I ran in the past and he helped out a lot. There are other guys in Korea also that help out, but most of them are very temporary base. We are hoping to get the guy in Canada to work a little bit closer to us, but

Matt: It’s a process, so I get it. Yeah.

Aron Koh: It takes a while.

Voice Acting in Pizza Bandit

Matt: So with the trailer you were showing me, you could hear the different voice lines in the background, so based on region or you’re going to have different voice actors for it or you’re going to have just a unified one and then as the game progresses, if it grows in popularity or sell rate, incorporate other voices and languages.

Aron Koh: In the whole build that we, Alpha tested, there’s only one voice actor that it’s only during the cinematic scene that we have. All the rest are actually it’s voice text generation. It’s text-to-voice generation. And we had a lot of feedback that it sounds really bad, it sounds robotic, but I think the technology is getting a lot better and we process it through a lot of different ways and now it’s getting better and better.

I mean, if we have budgets to use voice actors, we really want for the key characters in the game, like the protagonist. And there’s a guy called Finn, which is sort of like an Android that drives the time machine and help you out with your pizza shop, those two, and he’s the guy who narrates all the mission objectives and stuff. So those two would be awesome.

But I think even from those three months ago, Finn’s voice was, it was really awkward. But I think for our next build for PAX West, we’ll see a lot smoother pronunciation and information. So we’re getting there, but our hope is to get voice actors in the future.

Matt: No voice actors are expensive unless you outsource it to freelancers or people who just are passionate.

Roll Mechanic & Stamina

Matt: Earlier we were talking about how the roll mechanic is such a pivotal feature of the game and how there’s a stamina meter. Are there any gameplay elements that let players actually increase that stamina meter so that they have the ability to roll more as they play and succeed?

Aron Koh: Not that I know of. In the previous game that stamina was you could increase it, but there were so many game design elements consumed stamina, which made it difficult for that game. If you run stamina goes down. If you roll, stamina goes down, and you can’t reload while running.

You can’t reload while getting hit, the reload canceled when you’d get hit. There’s so much stuff that was making it so much difficult. This one, instead, we try to make the stamina only go down where you roll. So I think that gives a lot of room for players to be able to maneuver a lot of this mission without having to increase the stamina bar.

Pizza Making, Other Recipes & Steam Deck

Matt: Okay. It makes sense. Now with the pizza making that we saw, is it going to be just one finite pizza style or as you go through these different missions, depending on the area, you get to create different types of pizzas, you’re not going to have the same kind of pizza In France?

Aron Koh: I’ll say this, it’s not just about pizza. The protagonist, is failing at owning pizza shop, right? And if just keeps making pizzas, he’s going to fail at his bounties too. So we’re going to put it through a lot of these missions where he has to learn a lot of different types of cooking.

So not just see pizza, but you’ll also see some grilling, some flipping, some slicing, some. Yeah, you are going to see a lot of different styles of cooking as you would in the Overcooked, and we’re thinking it helps them to learn a lot of these different cuisines so they can actually make it.

Matt: You were talking about the demo on the Steam deck earlier, how at first it didn’t want to cooperate with it, but then an update allowed it to play better. Was that partially because of a change in the frame rate where steam decks have been notorious for dropping the refresh rate?

Aron Koh: I think two things. One, in terms of control, we’ve put in a lot of work on the controller. And as a Korean, a lot of my friends in Korea only, I think less than my 10% actually use controllers. They’re all keyboard and mouse players, so we didn’t know how to make a good experience, but through going through a lot of different shows like PAX West and Level Up and PAX East, we had a lot of feedback from them.

So we were able to make it work really well on those Xbox controllers that we utilized during the show, and we were finally able to get all of those bits into set up for the Steam Deck and I think that’s one part. So the controller works really nicely, and I don’t know what they did recently, or I don’t know what we did recently. As you said, the frame drop has improved significantly. And I’m not using the new version either, but it

Matt: Oh, the OLED for the Steam deck. Yes.

Aron Koh: So I am using the old one that I purchased earlier last year. And yeah, it’s working really smoothly. We didn’t have to lower the graphic quality all that much. Well practicing. We set it to normal and it just working. Yeah, that was great.

Inspiration & Potential Easter Eggs

Matt: Obviously with cooking games, but bounty hunter / 3D duty shooters, there’s always inspiration from other games. Have you reached out to any other studios about collaborating like, hey, could we borrow a character for an Easter egg or could we have a character inspired by this as a nice little nod?

Aron Koh: I kind of am looking forward to it, we have a lot of stuff to do internally to clean up and get the basic content in there, but we’ve seen a lot of comments and some of the videos saying that there’s got to be Pizza tower arcade game, or there’s a lot of comments on some of the inspiration that we should take from other games. So we would love to, we just have to get the stuff done on our side to actually get the collaboration going. So getting around to that.

Matt: There’s a lot of legal, to be honest. I know when I was showing the game, somebody was like, you can have Master Chef there for Master Chief. But nice little easter egg.

Aron Koh: Yeah, that’s, that one’s going to be tough. I’m thinking a little more like an indie studio.

Why a Shooter?

Matt: Yeah, Indie Studios are typically easy to work with. You were talking about how the team is basically from a whole bunch of different studios and how but most of you guys do not have the first-person or third-person shooter aspect. What made the team really want to go into that between the two games, Rift Sweepers, and then Pizza Bandit?

Aron Koh: When we moved here in 2018, I was close friends with all of these guys when they founded the studio, but I joined early last year, at that time, I think we made RPGs, but it was always towards action RPGs. So we made a mobile action RPG in, I think we launched in 2019.

It didn’t do well, but right around that time, one of the big IP action, IP action cartoons, well Manga, I would say IP from Japan knocked on our doors and we started working on that project, but that one didn’t get released to the publisher Flash for business reasons.

But after that, we’re like, we really got to do work on some action games. But our director in charge who’s leading the production of this game is super into Shooters, and I think he’s the one who pushed the most. And this one day he just came back with, Hey, if we don’t know what we’re going to do, can we do this? And he pulled out a prototype and got the team to play it, and they’re like, oh, this is looking good. And with that prototype, we were able to get a little funding after a G-Star, which it’s just one of the big game shows in Korea. We put that prototype out there and we got funding from it.

We’re on the verge of a life-and-death situation for the studio running out of money. But this thing just got us funded, so we’re like, yeah, let’s really go for it. Great job. Our director’s name is Shego, and he is pulling the wheel on this one. Oh, by the way, our CEO used to be, I mean, we’ve been around for a long time and our CEO used to be a Ranker in Rainbow Six, and this is a long time ago. So we do enjoy a lot of shooter games. So I think that kind of supported it too.

Development Curves

Matt: What have been some of the setbacks/headaches during the development process, or even just the learning curves?

Aron Koh: A learning curve, huh?

Matt: You were talking about how earlier with the other game you figured out it was just too difficult for most players. And then the stamina aspect of all the different things that relied upon it. But outside of those,

Aron Koh: I think trying to figure it out. I don’t know if I mentioned before, we don’t have an animator, but we don’t have an illustrator either in our studio. So everything that we do is we create from 3D assets or we try to imagine we put a piece together stuff that we have. And even our outsource collaborator, he doesn’t do illustration either. So it’s the visual concept or visual design, I think. I believe if we have the right talent, we could do a lot better job with it.

But we are really struggling to try to make the game pop in order to stand out without a very strong visual style. I mean, we’re trying to put in the style as much as we can with the talent we have, but I think that was one of the biggest struggles trying to come up with a logo or a key art or a video or new concept for a character. It’s been a little struggle.

And like I said, during our introduction before that, we like to make the core gameplay with a lot of the borrowed assets from the stores and stuff, and then we try to make it better. And there’s an advantage to that. But there’s also a disadvantage to that because you’ve made so much of it, it really, takes a lot of resources and effort to change the entirety of the visuals from it. So you kind of get stuck with the style of the assets that you use from the start. You start out with pixel art or block art stuff, if you build a prototype with the block art stuff, it’s really hard to move away from it.

So I think that’s one of the biggest struggles, trying to make the game pop with the limitation on the artistic talents that we have within our studio. I think that’s the biggest one. And the next one would be mostly trying to get the difficulty right and I think we’ve gotten a lot of help from our community and gamers that we meet during the shows to help around with it. So that’s kind of gotten a good process for it.

Coming to Other Platforms

Matt: Makes sense. Now, you were talking earlier about launching originally on PC and then wanting to move to other platforms, and you were talking about how the Xbox transition has been semi-difficult.

Aron Koh: I think it’s more like none of us worked on consoles before. I don’t think it’s the development process that’s difficult. I think just trying to get all the basic business stuff done, signing a lot of agreements, creating a lot of accounts, and getting everything sorted away. That’s been taking quite a bit of time because we’ve never done it before and we’re at the very end, but we ended up starting to talk to, talked to one of their technicians on their sites because they’re not letting us finish one of the process that we’re in. But it’s nothing big. And in terms of our programming and engineering ability, we are, I’m pretty confident that we’ll be able to, once everything’s all squared off, we’ll be able to get that running really quickly.

Matt: The reason why I asked that is I’ve been talking to a few different indie devs and they were talking about the process of getting it onto the Xbox wasn’t on the actual company itself, but all the legal framework, and then you have the port size that they limit and that side of the process.

Aron Koh: So I think ours is more about the legal process side that’s been holding impact a little bit.

PAX West and Future Plans?

Matt: So with PAX West around the corner, and then you said there’s another build aspect coming. Is there just gauging everyone’s feedback, and finding investors for additional things to work on? Or is there more of a go there, see reaction plan of release date, or a little bit of both?

Aron Koh: Well, I think all of the above. So when we went to the shows previously, we only had two stations that not only has the ability to perform, single-player, but this time we’ll have four stations. We’re going to set up a little private network and we are going to let them actually be able to play co-op at the show.

So yeah, this time I think testing how the co-op things work and getting hands-on feedback from the players is going to be a big thing. We are going to showcase a little bit of cooking that is not pizza making and I want to see how players respond to that too. We are getting closer and closer to our deciding to figure out what the launch timeline is. So overall, what do you call it?

Matt: Preparation?

Aron Koh: Yeah, sense and excitement on how players are viewing the game and how much we can penetrate through the noise during the show to get a little bit of a presence in the market. I think that’s going to be all key parts of PAX West. We really wanted to go to Gamescom, but it’s back-to-back doing both shows with one person. Yeah, it’s hard.

Controller or Keyboard & Mouse?

Matt: It’s a lot of work and just wears down your body. So for that PAX West demo, are you going to focus primarily on just controller support or are you going to give players the option for keyboard and mouse or?

Aron Koh: Oh, we’ll have a keyboard, mouse, and controller and I think the main part is that being able to let them play co-op with their friends that they are hanging out with. And there are a lot of groups of four that are looking for a new co-op game. And we’ve had a lot of that in previous shows too. So you know what let them play co-op here.

Content Creators/Influence & Cooking Changes

Matt: So not an actual gameplay aspect, but more of a marketing aspect. Have you reached out to any content creators/influencers to kind of help market the game or whenever it gets to that beta, close beta, just word of mouth and people trying it aspect?

Aron Koh: So during the last alpha, we did reach out to a lot of content creators to try the game. We are, and we have a list of creators that we have met during the previous shows that showed interest. So we are going to have another alpha test in the coming month, hopefully. So I think it always works better when there’s something to play than just something to talk about. So we are hoping to do another round of that during our next play test.

Matt: So the site’s head editor is a very Italian man, so very much he’s like, Ooh, pizza aspect. We already asked the question, are there going to be different types of pizzas and you said there’s going to be different types of cooking. With future content, are you going to see where players fall and what they like to cook and then lean towards that way for different recipes you want to do? Or is it just going to be different, you’re just going to keep trying different cooking variations?

Aron Koh: You know, so we do want to have more pizza in the game, so I definitely say I would not exclude new types of pizza or new types of pizza recipes to show up in the mission, but it’ll be in a different form of mission or we’re thinking about trying to come up with things that players can do in the lobby while they wait for your friends to join and stuff.

So yeah, different recipe. I think I would say any of that is out of the picture. I think we might pick up a few of them. I think currently we’re focusing on showcasing different aspects of the game style, different cooking mechanisms, and different mission mechanisms. But yeah, there’s a group of some folks in our studio that really wants to put pineapple pizza in and I’m more of a pizza purist, like your Italian boss, oh come on, is that, anyways, but I think something’s going to happen in the future. We’re going to see some ridiculous stuff in there.

Matt: As the players complete these different missions and unlock gear/equipment, is any of the money that obviously he wants to make his business succeed, are you going to be able to upgrade the pizza shop?

Aron Koh: That’s a big piece of content. I mean, we could slap on some mechanics, but it has to be fun. So we do want to put it in, I think it’ll depend on the resource constraints. We might not be able to get that in during early access, but if it goes really well, we might be able to put something in there. But we do joke about making a sequel to this game and making a whole simulation aspect towards the pizza shop in the lobby. But that’s the way in the future.

But we do really like the idea of being able to upgrade the pizza shop, even if it’s just for visual sake. We’re definitely looking into it. That one also is, I guess, more conditional based on the reality of whether we could actually have the time and money to do it.

Cosmetics & Visual Customization

Matt: Will the player’s character have different cosmetic upgrades?

Aron Koh: Yes. And you’ll be able to see that during PAX West.

Matt: Okay. And then, so obviously with not being at PAX, just keep an eye out for the build.

Aron Koh: We might be able to, so we’re currently deciding whether we should sort of prepare a demo build that can be played during the PAX period. But we’ll see. See we haven’t decided yet, but if we have a build that we can share, we’ll definitely reach out to you. Alright. And of course, the first cosmetic is going to be very cooking game-worthy.

Matt: Thank you very much.

Aron Koh: Alright, thanks for your time.

Pizza Bandit is in development for Windows PC (via Steam), though a release date hasn’t been confirmed.