Feed the Dungeon is the 2025 Capstone project of Too Many Cooks.
Feed the Dungeon follows its protagonist, Chef, the Raccoon Cook, into the Mad Dungeon's maw, where our player finds themselves cutting down, and dicing up the many beastly inhabitants of the Dungeon, and along the way, cooking delicious meals out of their corpses.
As a part of the Too Many Cooks team, Daniel Aleksic took on the role as the games Art Director, one of the Concept-Artists, and 2D-Animators, as well as a Technical Artist
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Check it out for free here
Pictured at Gamespond 2025, Too Many Cooks
DESIGN OVERVIEW
A detailed overview of Aleksic’s contributions to Feed the Dungeon reaches into many aspects of the games’ design, look, and feel. This was due to the collaborative process which became Feed the Dungeon’s production. With all members being extremely passionate and driven to fill the dungeon with as much heart as they could.
Aleksic’s specific contributions began with general character ideation and sketches. Creating multiple rounds of designs to be assessed by his team members, so that he could more accurately portray the vision of his team. This was an extremely important part of the design process to Aleksic, as he wanted to be able to share his ideas for the game, but also let his team be a part of the process so they could feel more attached to the games artwork, instead of being emotionally disconnected to it.
After the first few rounds of ideation, and sketches. Aleksic had a far more realised idea of what the Too Many Cooks team wanted out of Feed the Dungeon. This allowed Aleksic to become much more sure of himself, and what aspects of his initial designs to hone in on in the coming design stages. Those being a more cartoonish approach towards the main character, mixed with a rougher realism towards potential enemies within the game. This design keynote was what Aleksic wanted to keep as an extremely influential factor when designing characters. To make our main character out to be this bundle of joy and light-heartedness, facing a treacherous dungeon filled with cruel beasts.
For the second stage of concepting, Aleksic expanded his aperture for character design, experimenting with different monster/creature designs for the various creepers who would inhabit the dungeon. This was alongside his attempts at designing the main character for Feed the Dungeon. This stage would eventually produce Chef, the red raccoon cook, who would act as the protagonist for Feed the Dungeon.
After designs for each inhabitant of the Dungeon was agreed upon by the team. Aleksic, alongside his 2D-Animation team, set on to finalise those designs by confirming their look on paper, by making Turnarounds for each major animated creature.
Next came animating those characters, which was by far the most time consuming of all tasks. Though as Too Many Cooks had planned from the beginning that character animation would take the most amount of time, they had accounted for it, and allocated it the largest window possible, with as much grace as possible, within the year-long production of Feed the Dungeon.
ANIMATION OVERVIEW
Aleksic’s specific animation work for Feed the Dungeon included; the Chefs’, the Harpys’, and the Firebulls’ Sprite Animations. He also did additional supporting work including; Chefs’ weapons’ visual effects, the Firebulls’ fireball, the in-game Ferocious Tomato vine and fruit sprite, and the in-game Fire Mushrooms.