Meet the three Filipino siblings behind upcoming ARPG, Dogwood

Filipino siblings are making Dogwood, a cooking RPG that has a lot of heart in a story that is about finding home.

The upcoming game from Filipino indie studio Team Soleil follows Doug, a dog trying to keep his hometown alive after a war between plants and animals permanently changed the world around him. Players venture into dangerous forests to gather ingredients, fight or tame hostile creatures, then return home to cook meals and serve the people rebuilding their lives. Rather than chasing a prophecy or saving the world, Dogwood is interested in what comes after those stories usually end.

“We wanted to tell a story about those who didn’t win the war,” Team Soleil told Technology Inquirer. “Those who had to live with the consequences and do the best they can despite them.”

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Dogwood is being developed by the three Castro siblings. Krystell writes the story, Aiole creates the game’s art, and their youngest sibling, Kai, leads development. The project started during the COVID-19 pandemic as an idea the three worked on between school and work before they committed to full-time development in late 2024. Winning the Young Creatives Challenge in 2025 gave the team its first funding and helped move the project forward.

Although the Steam page describes Dogwood as a cooking RPG, it wasn’t always presented that way. The developers originally referred to it as a restaurant simulator before deciding that description missed the point.

“If you had seen the Steam page for Dogwood in 2025 compared to this year’s, you’d definitely see some differences,” they said. “We stopped calling it a restaurant simulator and went with ‘cooking game’ instead because we decided that it wasn’t so much a story about running a restaurant but more so the act of cooking and how it shaped their world.”

Instead of chasing higher profits or expanding into a larger business, players spend most of their time getting to know the people who live in New Meadow. Restaurant staff and regular customers all have names, personalities, and their own storylines. Helping them unlocks new features and side quests, while the people Doug chooses to support also influence parts of the story.

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Team Soleil said the restaurant became Doug’s way of expressing himself to a town where he has always struggled to belong.

“We realized that, to Doug, the restaurant was his personal message to his town. It’s his way of saying, ‘This is who I am. This is who I see you as.'”

The siblings grew up moving between the United States and the Philippines and said they often felt caught between two cultures.

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“When we moved back to the Philippines, that disconnect continued because we didn’t talk or act fully Filipino. We were somewhere in-between culturally.”

Those experiences shaped Doug, who was raised among prey animals despite being born a predator. Instead of making that conflict the game’s central mystery, Dogwood explores how Doug slowly earns a place within his community.

Food became part of that story because of the pandemic. Krystell said she started recreating meals her family could no longer enjoy after restaurants closed and grocery prices climbed.

“I fought back against that feeling by making it a mission to recreate our favorite meals,” she said. “It was incredible when it succeeded because it’s like stepping back in time and sitting down in our favorite Indian restaurant, eating garlic naan.”

She said those moments eventually became the emotional basis for Dogwood’s cooking mechanics, where preparing meals is as important to the story as exploring the wilderness.

Combat draws inspiration from Ikaruga, asking players to switch polarities while avoiding enemy attacks, and from games like Undertale and Deltarune, where creatures can be spared instead of defeated. Players can also tame monsters they encounter, giving them another option besides combat as they gather ingredients for the restaurant.

Combining those ideas proved to be one of the team’s biggest development challenges. The developers studied games such as Dave the Diver and Chef RPG and concluded that successful genre hybrids work because every system serves the same idea.

“What we did notice is that many of the games that blended genres weren’t always able to match the genres well mechanically, but they tethered them through something else: narrative, theme, atmosphere, or even the general vibe.”

For Team Soleil, that common thread became community. Exploring dangerous areas, gathering ingredients, cooking meals, and building relationships all support the same goal: helping New Meadow recover.

The studio believes more Filipino developers are beginning to pursue original ideas as local support programs continue to grow, although convincing people that game development is a legitimate career remains a challenge.