A Fire Emblem Modder Is Making a Roguelite Tactical RPG With Restaurant

Before developing Food Devils, studio founder and game director Alfred Kamon spent years exploring tactical RPG design, beginning with the Fire Emblem fan project Midnight Sun before moving into original development with Path of the Midnight Sun. His latest project takes that experience in a different direction, combining traditional tactical RPG combat with roguelite progression, restaurant management, and character relationships. While the influences are familiar, Food Devils introduces its own ideas about how players approach combat, build their parties, and adapt to each expedition.

We spoke with Kamon about his beginnings as a Fire Emblem modder, the challenges of balancing randomized adventurers and more than 200 skills, and how the game’s Devil Contracts, restaurant management, and romance systems come together. Food Devils will release on PC via Steam Early Access on November 3, 2026

From Fire Emblem to Food Devils

Azario Lopez: You started with Fire Emblem: Midnight Sun before moving into original games. When you began designing Food Devils, what was one Fire Emblem convention you knew you wanted to approach differently?

Alfred Kamon: Thank you for your question, it’s really cool to be reminded of your origins as a Fire Emblem modder (haha). One thing I wanted to approach differently was the very linear structure of traditional Fire Emblem campaigns. Usually you clear a map once, move on, and that carefully designed map is gone forever.

With Food Devils, I wanted tactical maps to remain interesting even when you revisit the same biome many times. That’s where the roguelite structure came in. You can choose which biome and Area you want to explore, while maps, enemies and objectives can change between expeditions instead of following one straight sequence.

At the same time, I didn’t want procedural generation to destroy the deliberate map design I love about Fire Emblem. So the maps themselves are handcrafted, and I’ve spent months designing them manually, while the game randomizes which maps, enemies and situations you’ll encounter.

Azario Lopez: Tactical RPGs often rely on a fixed cast, while Food Devils gives players randomized adventurers. How did you approach making those temporary characters feel worth investing in?

Alfred Kamon: I think the fact that they’re randomized can actually make players more attached to them in a strange way.

Each adventurer can have a different appearance, stats, traits and even personality. For example, you might recruit a very knightly Warrior in one playthrough and a cynical one in another, each with their uniquely voiced lines. Then you start taking that character on expeditions, and suddenly this random adventurer named Kelly Smelly with the Spice Spitter personal trait has survived with you for five hours and killed four bosses.

Personal traits, appearance, personality, voice lines, rarity and stats – these elements all contribute to making a character feel “special,” together with your own headcanons. The main inspiration for this approach was Darkest Dungeon with its cast of adventurers.

But I’ll admit that the main focus of the game remains the Devils. The story revolves around them, and they’re essentially your main cast of units, with intriguing backstories and romance options. They’ll get most of the players’ attention, and that’s perfectly fine – Sorry, Smelly Kelly!

Roguelite Expeditions and Tactical RPG Combat

Azario Lopez: Because Food Devils is also a roguelite, players are constantly rebuilding parties and adapting to new situations. What was the hardest part of making that structure work with tactical RPG combat?

Alfred Kamon: Probably making adaptation feel strategic instead of feeling like the game is simply throwing random stuff at you.

Navigating the menus and changing equipment also needed to be fast and practical, given how many times it happens in a run.

I think Food Devils gives you a solid starting plan through your party and Devil Contract, but then asks you to adapt that plan as the expedition develops. And that’s where the combination becomes interesting, because you’re still playing a tactical RPG, but you can’t rely on exactly the same solution every time. Just like in any roguelike, you’ll learn with experience which combinations are optimal.

Azario Lopez: Devil Contracts can change a character’s skills and mobility. How much freedom do they give players to push a class outside of its expected role?

Alfred Kamon: Pretty far! That’s one of the systems I’m most interested in seeing people experiment with.

Your adventurer starts with their own class, stats and characteristics, but then, at the beginning of the expedition, you’re asked to select a Master Rule, which is “how you’ll generate Calories for the Devil during this run.” For example, if you select “Bonfire Bonanza,” Hunter Devil will sap Calories from every adventurer that ends their turn adjacent to a Bonfire tile. This immediately gives a new role to the Hunter-contracted Warrior, because they have the ability to produce Bonfire tiles. So, instead of giving them a DPS role for this run, it might help with Calories generation. And this is just a very simple example with the Master Rule. On top of that, runs will have skills that will fundamentally change what a base kit is supposed to do, and you could turn a Healer into a tank or a debuff monster. You can also find Codex Clauses that are team-wide buffs for the entire duration of the run.

Azario Lopez: You have more than 200 skills alongside procedural expeditions and randomized characters. How do you balance that amount of variation while still making combat readable and deliberate?

Alfred Kamon: There are actually over 200 skills in the Early Access version alone, so yes, this has been one of our biggest design challenges.

I don’t think the solution is making every skill perfectly equal. In a roguelite, part of the fun is finding something unusually strong and realizing that it works incredibly well with your current build. I want people to discover broken strategies. The important thing is that players understand why they’re working.

So readability has been a huge priority for us. We’ve spent a lot of time improving tooltips, combat previews, terminology and our Glossary, and we also created the Training Grounds, which are small puzzle-like maps that teach individual mechanics without throwing ten systems at the player at once.

Once the players have figured out the basic mechanics of the game, then it’s up to them to turn a normal SRPG map into a roguelike massacre. And I think that’s part of the fun in roguelikes, so we’ve tried not to be excessively strict when nerfing strong but hard-to-master strategies so far.

Restaurant Management and Character Relationships

Azario Lopez: The restaurant directly affects recruitment and progression. Why did you want that management side to feed into the tactical systems rather than exist mainly as a hub between battles?

Alfred Kamon: Because I didn’t want the restaurant to feel like a completely separate minigame that you visit just because the food-themed game tells you to.

The restaurant was designed as the other half of the gameplay loop. Expeditions give you ingredients and progression, then what you do at the restaurant influences your next expedition. Furniture can affect which adventurers visit and some of their characteristics, kitchens can influence their innate traits, and the dishes you cook give you bonuses for the next run.

So even when you’re decorating the restaurant or deciding what to cook, you’re still making strategic decisions.

Otherwise we’d have “the tactical game” and “the restaurant game” sitting next to each other. I wanted them to constantly feed into one another instead (pun intended).

Azario Lopez: Food Devils clearly isn’t shy about its fanservice, but the Devils can also form relationships with each other. How did you approach making the romance system feel like part of the cast’s characterization rather than something built entirely around the player?

Alfred Kamon: I definitely didn’t want the Devils to exist only to fall in love with the player.

You can romance all five Devils regardless of which Chef you choose, and yes, there’s plenty of fanservice. I’m not going to pretend otherwise, haha. But they’re also characters with their own strong ideals (“Appetites” in the game lore), conflicts and relationships with each other. More importantly, they’re convinced that they’d die if they betrayed their main Appetite, so this leads to all sorts of misunderstanding and interesting situations.

Those bonds aren’t purely cosmetic either – relationships between Devils can eventually unlock unusual combinations of Devil Contracts and other strategic possibilities.

Letting them have relationships outside of the Chef makes the cast feel much more alive to me. They’re not five romance options waiting in separate rooms for the protagonist to select them, but active parts of the game and its core loop.

Bringing 14 Years of Tactical RPG Experience to Food Devils

Azario Lopez: Looking back at Midnight Sun, Path of the Midnight Sun, and now Food Devils, is there something you’ve wanted to do in a tactical RPG for years that you finally feel you’re able to accomplish here?

Alfred Kamon: I’ve been making tactical RPGs in one form or another for about 14 years now, and I think Food Devils is the first time I’ve had enough experience, resources and freedom to combine almost everything I love about the genre in one game.

Midnight Sun was me learning game design inside Fire Emblem. Path of the Midnight Sun was our first completely original commercial game, but it still had a much more linear structure.

With Food Devils, I finally get to make a tactical RPG that feels truly “mine,” while at the same time resonating with thousands of players worldwide. The combination of genres, the art style and the story all feel distinct, and I’m incredibly grateful for that. I also wouldn’t have been able to direct a game like this without the fantastic people I’ve met along the way, and the fans who have supported my projects for 14 years.

In the end, I guess the game designer in me never stopped whispering, “I want to make my own Fire Emblem.” The dream stayed the same… while the scope kept growing with me.

Food Devils is set to release on PC via Steam Early Access on November 3, 2026