Project Cappuccino - 2018 Development Road Map v2

Hey everyone! It’s been around 4 months since our last Development Road Map and we’ve got a few new goals to work towards! We’ve made more progress than we expected since April with the addition of Cerise and the second room, so it’s time to revamp. Please keep in mind that some of the content of this road map has been carried over from our original one, so some of you may have seen some of these things mentioned already.

For the sake of convenience, we've also created a google docs version of this map that can be seen here.

The game has come a long way since it was first introduced back in November 2017. The spirit of it remains strong and we never imagined it would grow like this. Project Cappuccino began development in May 2017. Due to our jobs interfering with production, the initial public build took us about 6 months to produce, however I would say that only 2-3 of those months were spent doing dedicated Project Cappuccino work. At the time, it was simply a hobby that Dokucchi and I were devoting our free time to. When we released our demo, we never expected the level of support that we’ve had and we sincerely thank you as we are now in the early steps of dedicating ourselves to turning this into a career. With the sentimental stuff out of the way, it’s time to talk about the juicy stuff. A lot of our original game design has been improved based on your feedback and we’ll try to cover as much as possible.

Without further ado, here’s how our workload is looking in the coming months.

The story is quickly catching up to the point where Mira makes her move, and we’ll be adding her into the first room. Most of the code required for her has already been prepared and we can expect to have her in place within a month’s time. 

This is the original concept sketch that we’re going to be using for her room 1 sprite. Small details may still change but we’re satisfied with the way this retains her air of superiority.

Our goal with Mira is to have her be a little harder to please than the other girls. She’s going to like it when players go hard and fast right off the bat and her tastes will lean more towards the masochist side. Keeping her fully aroused will prove to be a challenge and she is definitely the “Hard” difficulty so to say.

Now that the story has progressed a bit more, we’ll be tackling the character undressing system. This mechanic was in our first road map, but we’ve now solidified the idea behind it and will be implementing it ASAP.

When encountering a character, players will be given the option of taking off pieces of clothing one at a time. Selecting a piece of clothing to take off will trigger the appropriate CG of the character undressing before returning you to the initial undressing scene. At this point, the character will be missing the selected piece of clothing. This will continue until the character is completely nude or the player decides to skip it.

The undressing feature will have subtle animations like breathing, blinking, arm and leg movements while the character waits for you to tell them what to take off. The girls will talk to the player and respond according to things such as their mood, how much they like the player and what clothing has already been taken off. In the future, their poses will also vary depending on which room you decide to use.  

Our $1500 goal is coming up and we’re excited to improve on character poses! Currently, the character’s bodies don’t move when their expressions change, and we’d like to change that to have different arm and body positions. This will help breathe a little more life into the characters. Here’s a quick look at how Sophie may change. 

At the moment, she’s the only one who has concept art for this change. We plan on making sure that their expressions reinforce their personalities and allow players to connect with them a little better. 

So far we’ve added in the foundation for the Gallery system and Love Tokens, which will be used to unlock gallery images. Next, we need to polish the gallery, add in all currently existing images (including but not limited to: Patron Requests, In Game CGs and Backgrounds), and fine-tune how you receive Love Tokens. In our latest build, Love Tokens do not save just yet and are in somewhat of a testing stage. 

The current prototype of the gallery allows you to view images at their original resolution. Doku puts an immense amount of work into each of these pieces and we felt that players would be missing out by seeing a reduced resolution in game. We’ll be keeping a close eye on performance and making some optimizations to the game overall so that the large images do not cause any issues. In order to have the gallery fully implemented, we’re going to need to make a small improvement to the save/load system and add a global save file that manages the gallery images. 

Some of you may be aware, but we currently have plans for an improvement to the Save/Load system. One of the biggest pain points we have in-game is the inability to change selected save file in the middle of a play through. We’re going to be implementing this feature as well as global save data that will track your unlocked gallery images and purchased toys. The main reason for having a global save is so that players have the option of saving constantly without creating any discrepancies between their unlocked content.

It’s been brought to our attention that the Main Menu and Options Menu have fallen behind in terms of design and polish. These menus were some of the very first elements that were created for Project Cappuccino back in May 2017 and are understandably due for an update. 

We’ve planned out a way of creating a more attractive, animated main menu in which the girls cycle in randomly as if they were working a shift at the Resting Bean. The girls that appear depend on who you have encountered in story mode, so for example, Cerise won’t show up until you have a save file that’s reached Chapter 3. Doku will be spending some time creating animations for this that will help show off the character’s personalities. 

As for the options menu, we’ll be trying to go for a uniform look throughout the game. Lighthearted and simple is what we’ve settled on.

There are also some game play improvements coming up, such as a “Character Standing” menu where you can see how much a girl likes you throughout the story. This menu also gives you an idea as to which story route you’re currently on.

We’re going to be leaving some extra space on this menu so that we can manage alternate outfits down the line, if we add them that is. Implementing alternate outfits is an ambitious idea that may not work throughout the entire game. There’s much more planning that needs to be done in order to properly add them and if we aren’t capable of it, we may end up just having the alternate outfits show up in the undressing system. 

At this stage of development, it’s safe to say that we are about 60% done with the story of Project Cappuccino. The game is close to entering Chapter 4 and we expect Chapter 5 to be the climax. This isn’t to say that there will be a single end point; The game routes are diverging and we’ve got a few endings that we’ll be developing in the coming months. On Doku’s side, there are a few CG’s left to add for some scenes that are already in game, so the writing for Project Cappuccino is more likely to be finished before all of the art is plugged in.

We’ve got a lot more in store for you guys coming up, and we hope you’re looking forward to it all as much as we are! Thanks for all the support and feedback you’ve given us, we really couldn’t have gotten this far without you.

-Vanis & Dokucchi