"I believe what beats even the best photography is the personal experience."
- Final Fantasy XV’s art director Tomohiro Hasegawa in a recent Eater story.
It’s easy to see how much care and work went into creating the different recipes in Final Fantasy XV just by glancing at an image of the hyper-realistic dishes. But a story from Eater explains the finer details of the process, like how the team sometimes ventured outdoors to first cook potential dishes on a camp stove.
The full article has a lot of lessons to offer developers, including how the Final Fantasy XV team used food as both a world building tool and a way to bring their own life-experiences into the final game.
Hasegawa explained that bringing the team together to cook and photograph some of the recipes featured in the game helped them capture the joy of camping and bring that same feeling to the adventures in Final Fantasy XV.
"You know how even the simplest foods can taste really delicious when you’re out camping? We wanted to focus on that same feeling while we created them,” said Hasegawa.
“I believe sharing feedback amongst the team members is what leads to the high-quality of the final recipe images. This is not just for the recipes — within the Final Fantasy XV game production as a whole we constantly ask ourselves: ‘How can we incorporate the team members’ real-life experiences into the game itself?”