Dev Blog 32 | Jel's Cafe | Plans for a new minigame

Hello all. I'm sorry for the lack of blog posts for the past few weeks. I've still been working on the game since 0.2a, however most of the work I've been doing isn't all that interesting.

This week I can explain everything that I have done and my plans to include a new minigame!

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JEL'S CAFE PROGRESS

Money and Stats rebalance:

Feedback I gathered from playtests of 0.2a showed me a few things. The highlights were Staff gave too much money, Upgrades and Special Gifts were too expensive, and lastly the game feels a bit too long.

I've began fixing some of these issues.

I won't go into full detail, but the baiscs are, staff will now give you slightly less money, customers will now give you more money, upgrades will be greatly reduced in cost, and have secondary upgrades removed whilst also increasing the impact of the first upgrades. Special gifts are being reworked entierly and having all of their costs heavily reduced.

I've still got to implement all of these values correctly everywhere, but from my rough planning this should make progress in the game feel a lot more rewarding being able to spend money on upgrades and other items.

Week rework:

I've began reworking how the ingame weeks work. Currently you spend 7 days at the cafe, and then at the end of day 7 in story mode, you head on down to hell to pay off your quota.

Myself and a few others felt that 7 days feels a bit too long. So instead the weeks are going to be changed to 5 days at the cafe instead, with day 6 being exlusively paying the quota, and day 7 being a free day where you will (eventually) have the option to walk around a small park area, where you can talk to guest characters, customers, or just enjoy the scenery. You'll also be allowed to go to the upgrade or theme shops on this day too.

Day 7 has yet to be implemented, but day 5 and 6's new functions have been added and work as intended! Day 7 is currently a low priority for me at this moment, but the groundwork to allow its existence has been created.

Bliss Cleanups:

Bliss has now specifically been fully cleaned up, now having the overworld interactions in every area in the game (rather than just the tutorial only).

The only things shes missing now is finalised dialouge in some areas, like the new special gift interactions and her ending questline.

Other characters will be worked on when I can, it takes a lot of time to make sure everything is all coded and cleaned, this is my next priority for 0.3.

Take Order Minigame:

Something thats been at the back of my mind, and was pointed out to me by a friend is that the gameplay is currently, kind of boring. It's a critcisim I also agree with, so I began planning to try and make the days a bit more intersting.

The "Take Order" mingame is a new interaction you'll be able to do with customers in order to figure out what a customer would like. It's a reaction based minigame where you press the interact key when the customers expression changes. Timing this successfully reveals part of the customers order, and you'll need to do this 3 times, with each succefully timed one rewarding you with extra tip money and stats. Failing to hit this results in some of the order being hidden, requiring you to guess.

Don't worry, if you do fail the minigame or have no interest in playing it, you can simply take a customers order the old fashioned way.

I created the basic framework for this minigame last night, and it works! It still needs a lot of work, both graphically, feedback wise and also balancing wise. But this is something I'm currently going to focus on before contiuing with cleaning up the customers code.

That's it for now, I still try my best to work on this project when I can. Currently I'm feeling a bit burnt out with all the censorship laws hitting me all at once, as well as August being a difficult month for me as my father passed away last year tomorrow.

Thank you all for you support, if you've yet to check out 0.2a you can find a link to it in one of the previous posts. Let me know what you think of it as I take note of all feedback and criticisms.