This article originally ran in Back Alley Games Issue 17, July 2025

Summer means two things around here: hot dogs and AllStars.

Luckily for us here at Back Alley, one intrepid team of developers crafted an experience that marries those seasonal pillars with the threat of carpal tunnel and a healthy dose of Wii-era shovelware nostalgia.

Hotdog Heaven: Chicago is a fast-paced cooking simulator that presents players with the opportunity to serve sausages covered in a plethora of concerning toppings to Chicagoans with normal facial expressions and the correct number of limbs.

The game lasts two minutes, or about as long as it takes world champion Miki Sudo to eat 10 hot dogs. In those two minutes, the player spins, shakes, and slices either their mouse or the crocheted knife that served as the game’s controller at the AllStars showcase in order to prepare ingredients and serve hot dogs.

“You start off squeezing mustard and then end up defusing bombs toward the end,” Khoi “Crowseeds” Pham, the game’s programmer, said.

Hotdog Heaven is an alt-control game, something Pham said was a response to the in-person nature of the AllStars showcase. After playing Rude Dew (Night City, 2024) at last year’s AllStars, he fell down the rabbit hole of alt-control games in the community, including Miki Straus’s Kaiju Dreams and Night City’s Channel: Death.

“The existence of a local indie game community that does in-person events was unheard of to my DC suburb mind,” Pham said. “I [took] advantage of the in-person format and made my first ever alt-control game. It really opened the realm of possibilities for what type of game I could make.”

Another part of Hotdog Heaven that was crafted for the showcase was the audio and visual styles, which are engaging, though players are generally too focused on the ingredients and inputs to notice. Instead, it is the spectators that benefit the most from the way the game looks and sounds.

“We wanted it to be a good game to spectate, which is why we came up with the gimmick of the game getting weirder as it went on. With the player focused on the gameplay, we had to make the visuals and audio get more and more sus over time to reward the audience for paying attention,” Pham said.

And get weirder it does, with eyeballs, fingers, and lizard wizards appearing as ingredients in the latter half of each round and customers becoming increasingly surreal. Al Capone makes an appearance, as does a man with a telepathic brain tumor.

The studio that produced Hotdog Heaven, hereby dubbed “Crowseeds and friends,” was formed in the collab channel of ICG’s Discord a few days before the jam period started. Each aspect of the finished game is a reflection of the team members who crafted it, mirroring their unique personalities and tastes.

Pham programmed and produced the game while crocheting and soldering the controller. The former was done in Unity, an engine he has been using since middle school. While game development is a hobby for him, he has been a fixture on Newgrounds for years.

“I post all my games on Newgrounds, and they’ve done the best there, winning a bunch of cash prizes,” Pham said. “I even got one of my games in the Legendary Games section on the website right next to The Binding of Isaac.”

He describes his games as “silly, short experiences,” and says he mostly works backward, coming up with a funny situation first and then crafting the mechanics to facilitate the punchline.

“I think it’s fun to think of games as a cool way to tell jokes and make people laugh,” Pham said. “For Hotdog Heaven, we knew we wanted to make a game that gets progressively weirder over time, but we didn’t really know how the ingredients were going to show up or what exactly we wanted the player to do.”

When it comes to the controller, Pham started with a Chinese motion sensor with unreadable instructions that did not communicate well with Unity. It was scrapped in favor of an Arduino that was soldered together in Pham’s unventilated apartment and covered with a crocheted knife.

In the future, Pham plans to work on longer projects, including more alt-control experiences, and to release his past work as a bundle on Steam.

The artists of Crowseeds and friends are Jisu Oh, another hobbyist who created backgrounds, ingredients, and other assets, and Popper, who designed all the customers.

Hotdog Heaven’s environment is bright and varied, with the ingredients and background looking straight out of a Saturday morning cartoon and the characters ranging from a pyramid of small men to a smiling, sentient hand.

The visual style creates most of the surreal charm of the experience, and that’s due in no small part to the work of Oh and Popper.

Popper is a friend and past collaborator of Pham’s who also designs characters for the show “Smiling Friends,” the property that has been compared most to Hotdog Heaven thus far. He spent a week staying at Pham’s apartment in preparation for the showcase and streamed most of his character design process for the game on his Twitch channel.

“I like making cartoons that people can see for half of a second and get enjoyment out of,” Popper said. “This project was conducive to that.”

The audio side of the project is made up of Justin Cavazos and Max Volpert’s work, with the two creating the music and sound effects, respectively. The pair are both on the team at Spit It Out! Audio, and use that experience to great effect here.

Volpert recorded sound effects for each and every ingredient, interaction, and input in the game, pairing the pop of a relish jar opening with the unsettling “thunk” of cutting a finger into thirds. 

Immensely satisfying “dings” come after each successful hot dog, and after a minute and a half of high-octane wiener action, they’re the most welcome sound in the world.

According to Pham, Cavazos and another voice actor “grumbled, mumbled, screamed, and occasionally spoke traditional human language into microphones for all 20 of the individually voiced characters.”

With how visually varied those characters are, voicing them couldn’t have been an easy task, but each line, from monotone screaming to a man insisting he is “definitely not Al Capone,” is perfectly placed.

Cavazos used FMOD to create the music for the game, crafting a “dynamic music system,” and describing the process as one where the individual music stems are mixed based off an internal Chaos meter.

“As you raise your score and the meter, different elements of the music are swapped out in real time,” Cavazos said. “This takes us from a cozy, cute backing track into a stressful, fast-paced drum and bass beat.”

He also explained that FMOD gave him and Volpert the flexibility to make the game seem like a cute cooking minigame at first and then let it devolve into the “psycho fever dream” they had always planned the experience to be.

Because of the strong creative visions of each member of the team, the end product is a vibrant work with memorable audio and immediately recognizable visuals alongside snappy and responsive gameplay.

Hotdog Heaven is a great example of the way that Pham says games can reflect their creators. He linked Big Scrumbo’s I LEFT MY SON AT THE GAS STATION! and Sonk’s Surfin’ Sewers directly to their creators, saying that after meeting and being acquainted with the two, he was able to see echoes of them in their finished works.

“The best games are the games that reflect their creators’ personalities,” Pham said. “It adds soul and makes them stand out. Everyone is different and their experiences are truly unique, which is why making games that reflect your tastes and personality is so important.”

Play Hotdog Heaven: Chicago here: https://crow-seeds.itch.io/hotdog-heaven-chicago