PlateUp! News

Hi everyone!

It was great to see all the support during the Steam Festival, and hi to everyone who jumped in on the demo. The demo will be remaining up from here on, so you'll be able to try it out whenever you like! The demo will also be getting updated to 0.6 with this patch, which will fix the problems people have reported, and add some new content!

[h2]Flower Pots[/h2]

In a much earlier version of the game, your restaurant used to be outside and could have little gardens, which means there's a few garden-related things in the game that will hopefully make an appearance later. For now though, I've added purchasable flower pots. Buying a pot will give you one flower each day, which you can use to get yourself out of a tight spot - each colour of flower has a different ability

[h2]Messy Customers[/h2]

Building on the improved messes from the last patch, there's now a new Messy Customers unlock, and customer groups with children will make more mess. To help you keep on top of all the flying food, the new napkin station will let you drop napkins off on people's tables to stop them making a mess

[h2]Layout Improvements[/h2]

Lots of people have been asking if they can build bigger restaurants: the game has always had a larger layout unlockable at level 9, but that takes a long time to get to, and it was unclear that you would get it. In this patch, I've added a new wide layout, which is a bit bigger and unlocked sooner. Watch this space, though; I'm hoping to rework layouts to add more variety and more types, including different settings and more unusual features

[h2]Conveyor Improvements[/h2]

Conveyors can now push things into more things, including dish washers, large sinks, plate stacks and ingredient sources. This should hopefully make them a bit more predictable and open up some more automation options.

[h2]Full patch notes - 0.6[/h2]

- Adds flower pot
- Conveyors can now push into more things (including dishwashers, ingredient sources, large sinks)
- Adds new wide layout, unlocked earlier than the large layout
- Adds napkins, Messy Customers upgrade and makes families messier
- Increase experience gain from doing well
- You will now have at least one layout choice from each layout type you have unlocked
- Fix mop water and sink splashes not being visible
- Fix bug with new layouts not being displayed correctly (thanks DuckingDuke and Summerborne)
- Fix bug with layouts not being granted at the right level
- Fix bug with placing items on top of each other
- Fix bug with rare crash at end of day
- Fix parcles being delivered in doorways (thanks LordyMatsuo)
- Fix messes spawning underneath things (thanks DuckingDuke)
- Fix for being able to start the day with unopened parcels (also added warning telling you) (thanks LordyMatsuo and others)
- Fix patience not being updated mid-timer if something changes (this also enables temporary patience improvers)

Catch Briony and Kirsty as they set out to beat their record and keep a restaurant open for a whole two weeks. Will they make it all the way to day 15?

(This is a restream of the earlier stream, due to a Steam problem that prevented some people from being able to watch)

Hi everyone, and hello to everyone here from Steam's Next Fest. I hope you're finding lots of fun demos to play!

The past two weeks I've been very busy with life and setting up the PlateUp Next Fest demo and streams. I've also been working on some new features and some bug fixes for this week's update.

[h2]Stream[/h2]

Briony and Kirsty will be streaming the game again live for the Steam festival this Wednesday from 2PM BST, so tune in to catch them then!

[h2]Demo[/h2]

All the new features in today's update will also be added to the demo, and there's a couple of tweaks to improve the demo; in particular it should now be clearer that the demo only includes the Steak dish. To see the others, tune into one of the streams and watch as we cook fish, pies and salads!

[h2]Fish and seafood[/h2]

The fish dish is currently quite easy; the idea is that you have lots of different possible fish to cook, but each day you get a random set of them, so you never quite know what you'll be dealing with. To improve this dish, I've added two new recipes; crab cakes and oysters.



[h2]Messes, fires and other accidents[/h2]

This update adds the start of a new aspect of the game, which should help keep you on your toes as you run your restaurant. A new appliance, the Budget Hob has been added, which is very cheap, but comes with a few draw backs -- every time you use it you run the risk of starting a fire! Fire will spread across your kitchen (including across spilled grease), but you can put it out by interacting with it and it won't do any permanent damage!



I wanted to add some things that mix up the gameplay during the day, but I didn't want it to feel frustrating or like it was forcing you to deal with an artificial problem. I've tried to fix this by tying fire to a particular appliance - if you don't buy the Budget Hob, your kitchen won't catch fire. So if you're happy to keep things simple, you can avoid it entirely. I plan to add more things like this, but I'm going to try and make them feel quite "opt-in". I'd love to know what you think, so jump on Discord and let me know; do you want to run the riskiest kitchen in the business, or are you happy keeping things safe?

As part of this, messes (from customers and now from hobs) will start off small and stack up if you don't clean them up; it should be easier to keep on top of things if you keep things tidy, but will be much harder to sort out if you let things run away!


[h2]0.5 Patch Notes[/h2]

This patch will be applied to the demo and the playtest, so everyone should see these changes

• Adds messy appliances: appliances can now cause mess when you use them. For now the sink will now splash water around, and the hobs will make grease that will slow you
  
• Added mess stacking
  
• Added oysters and crabs (part of Fish dish set)
  
• Adds large group unlock, allowing up to 6 customers at one table (they're comparatively patient, so you get lots of time to serve them)
  
• Adds fire(!)
  
• Adds new appliance Budget Hob (which may be related to fire)
  
• Fix bug with falling outside the restaurant and getting stuck (thanks Briony, Kirsty and basically everyone else!) - you should now be teleported back to the front door
  
• Allow players to place things over each other again (this was changed to fix the falling-out-the-world problem, placing appliances should be easier now)
  
• Fix bug with Informal Service (thanks JungleCat)
  
• Fix bug with restaurant being cut off at odd resolutions (particularly very tall ones)
  
• Fix problem with potato salads not being able to combine with sides (thanks Roxas)
  
• Fixes some bugs with recipes, so that plated tomatoes aren't smoking (thanks JungleCat for reporting)
  
• Balance tweaks to a number of dishes, including costs of steak cuts (thanks SummerBorne and Black_Knight43)
  
• Fix problems with the host stand, including customers queuing outside the map and bubbles getting stuck (thanks SummerBorne)
  

As part of the Steam Next Fest, I'm streaming my game PlateUp! and chatting with everyone. Ask me anything about the game's development then hop into the demo and try for yourself!

As part of the Steam Next Fest October, PlateUp! will be streamed live by Briony and Kirsty. Join them as they master pies, conquer soups and maybe even take on some crab cakes!

The demo is now available, so you too can jump in and join the culinary action!