Affogato News

Hey Magic Apprentices!

It's been almost half a year since the last Affogato demo was made public, and we're excited to announce that our new demo for Affogato is now live for a limited time only, and we welcome you to try it!

We would also like to take this opportunity to share with you the Affogato Steam Next Fest Trailer!

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Our new demo offers about two hours worth of playtime and you will play the role of Affogato, who together with the demon Mephista, restarts a café business in the city of Arorua. You will become a barista and brew coffee for your customers while using your mystical abilities to enter their minds and help them defeat their inner demons through reverse tower defense battle levels.



The city of Arorua never sees daylight, but you will still need to plan your daily schedule and organize your time wisely. In each day's cycle, you decide if it is better to do more business to improve your income, visit the bookstore and beauty salon in the city to improve your attributes, or forge closer relationships with your customers and solve their problems. It's all up to you!



These are what have been improved and added in comparison to the previous demo -

• Added Steam Festival Demo Reward: Café Limited Edition Skin American Vintage - Red
  
• Added two days of main storyline
  
• Added part of Natalie and Lindsay's side story
  
• Added difficulty selection function, currently there are three difficulties
  
• Added a map system where you can switch scenes through the map
  
• Added cell phone system, including mobile news, chat and BGM switching functions
  
• Added new battle levels and optimized the battle experience
  
• Optimized the collision detection of the scene, adjusted the lens, color tone, size and other content
  

Some additional notes.

• Players who play the Steam Next Fest Demo will get a Limited Edition Café Skin in the official version of Affogato (Please note: You don't need to complete the demo to get the skin. The skin will be unlocked in the official version of the game.)
  
• Please do not delete the trial version of the archive record, and ensure that steam's cloud archive function has been turned on.
  
• If the loading screen takes too long, please wait for a while.
  
• Please restart the game manually when you switch to another language.
  
• If you encounter bugs or can't start the game and other problems, please join our Discord server https://discord.gg/wEBNr3v2yj to inform us about the problem and submit your archive file and computer configuration details to the administrator. Thank you for your support and help!
  

If you enjoyed Affogato, do wishlist the game and share it with your friends who may like it. Your support means the world to us!

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Hey Baristas!

As you all know, Steam Next Fest is coming in February 2023, and we are excited to share that Affogato will be participating in it!

To give you a sneak peek of what's to come, we've crafted three short trailers that showcase different features of the game!

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Trailer 1: Reverse Tower Defense
The first trailer highlights the unique "reverse tower defense" mechanic in Affogato. Summon powerful witch cards as your allies in a fast-paced battle, while planning your path wisely to break down enemies' defenses. Strategically battle your way through your customers' inner demons and save them from their darkness!

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Trailer 2: The Art of Coffee Making
The second trailer introduces the coffee-making aspect of Affogato. Learn how to be a barista and experience the day-to-day of running a cafe. Discover and master the art of brewing a perfect cup of coffee and experience the satisfaction of seeing customers' smiles as they sip on the delicious coffee!

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Trailer 3: Friendship & Magic
As you play Affogato, you'll have the chance to meet and befriend a variety of customers, each with their unique personalities and abilities. Get to know your fellow customers, serve them delicious coffee and watch as your friendships develop and grow throughout the game!

We hope you enjoyed the short trailers. Over the next few weeks, we will be revealing more information, including the highly anticipated launch of our demo! Get ready to experience an epic adventure of serving delicious coffee and helping customers to defeat their inner demons in Affogato!

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Hey Magic Apprentices!

Our studio has been working tirelessly towards the launch of Affogato, and we are on track to launch it this year!

Are you ready to join us on this adventure? Dive in with us and see what we've been working on!

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Take a look at the first trailer we made:

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Join our communities:
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Hello Reverse Tower Defenders!

In our previous Q&A we addressed some general questions. In this issue of our Dev Q&A we will be fielding some questions regarding the game design and the premise of the game!



Q - Would you refresh everyone on the background story of Affogato please?

A - Absolutely! The plot revolves around a good witch called Affogato who visits a magical city called Arorua which doesn't ever see daylight and decides to call it home. There, she becomes the boss of a cafe and holds a double identity as a demon buster, helping her customers defeat their inner demons and overcoming personal challenges.



Q - Who is the mysterious white-haired girl who appeared at the end of the demo? Is she also a witch?

A - Her name is Aoi and she has the same demonic powers as Affogato. But Affogato probably wouldn't call her a witch after helping Aoi out of some trouble (Spoiler Alert!).



Q - Tell us more about the game! In the demo, there are several stages we could challenge. But there are very few locations we can visit in Arorua City. And although there are some shops, interaction is very limited. In the actual release of the game, would there be opportunities to interact more with the shops? And if so, how would these be integrated into the core gameplay?

A - Affogato is a story-rich game. We have planned for 4 Acts and 5 NPC plotlines.
In the game, shops play a role where players can visit them to increase their in-game statistics, which would in turn affect how the game progresses. For example, if you lack Courage points you would not be able to interact with a NPC and therefore not be able to unlock that particular storyline.

We have designed Affogato such that there is a finite amount of time you can spend within a game day, so that gamers will have to make decisions on how to best allocate it and juggle between improving their stats, pursuing the main storyline or exploring side quests and nurturing relationships with NPCs.



Q - What are the key themes of Affogato?

A - Magic, coffee, demons, hope.



Q - How many key characters are there in Affogato?

A - At the moment, we are planning for 4 lead characters and 5 supporting characters. Gamers can make coffee for them, fight their inner demons and solve their problems, establish friendships with them and ultimately save Arorua City together!

Above - A Version 0.1 mockup of a Battle Stage

Q - The 'reverse tower defense' genre is pretty niche. How are you tackling the battle system considering there are few references for this genre?

A - We began production with just a few monsters and direction changing tiles. Later on, we added more complex monsters and other mechanics - such as Charm, Change the World, etc. We also improved on the animation, environmental designs and effects.

Later on, we added Branch Missions and Daily Missions to add more variety to gameplay. The Branch Missions allow gamers to experience the different playing styles the numerous witches provide and the Daily Missions allow gamers to interact with the game on a deeper level. Experienced players will naturally get better rewards and less experienced ones can eventually work their way up to becoming more proficient as well.



An innovation we tried in the initial stages of production was to let players use defeated monsters to help them in battles. However, this design would prove to be very restrictive and we eventually found a compromise in the form of the Witch Card The Empress. This arrangement allows the defeated monsters to become temporary allies without making the gameplay too restrictive.

We also found that while the direction changing tiles is a great idea, it causes the team members to split up. To resolve this issue, we made it such that they would team up again when they bump into one another.



Q - In this process, what difficulties did you face?

A - Honestly quite a bit. One key challenge was that reverse tower defense games are few and far between, and it was a challenge to find any games we could take reference from. We have to depend pretty much on our own creativity and feedback from the early stage game testers to improve on and iterate the game design. In the earlier stages, we suffered from developer's tunnel vision syndrome and what we thought would work turned out to be too complicated for the gamers. Fortunately, you guys really gave us great feedback and we were able to pinpoint and work on those issues. We look forward to what you guys think of our upcoming demo which we will release in late January!

Above - The team is hard at work looking for bugs to squash.


Q - Any more interesting trivia you can share with us on your game design?

A - When we first worked on the game, we imagined that Affogato would share many similarities to Anomaly: Warzone Earth as it is also a reverse tower defense game. Interestingly, that didn't turn out to be so as fundamentally our game premise is very different and that naturally created differentiation in our game mechanics. For example, we allow ingame characters to split up and move about freely on the battle maps. This gives us the opportunity to design the battles in such a way that players can take down the bosses through innovative ways. They can choose to split up their team members to spread out and dilute the damage that is dealt to them, or move around the boss strategically to attack it from different angles.

That's all for Issue #2 of Affogato's Q&A! If you have other burning questions of your own, please feel free to ask them in the comments section below, and do follow us on our socials!

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Hello Reverse Tower Defenders!

As we work hard to get Affogato ready for launch, we will be increasing our frequency of posts on Steam so that you know what we are up to.

We will also be starting a regular Q&A issue where we will be answering some questions we receive from you!

Let's go!
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Q - What is a reverse tower defense game and why do you call Affogato one?

A - In traditional tower defense games, enemies move around your lead character(s) while you stay rooted, trying to prevent them from reaching an end point. In a reverse tower defense game, it is exactly the opposite - where your enemies stay rooted and you lead your main character(s) toward an end point.
We want to give credit to 11bit Studio's Anomaly: Warzone Earth for probably being the first game to adopt the reverse tower defense concept.

In our opinion, Affogato is a little more than just a reverse tower defense game. We added some of our own secret sauce to make the game more challenging, such as adding Blocking Seal on battle map to provide short term goals, adding Challenge Targets for players who want a challenge, adding elite boss battle for the most intense and exciting game experience.



Q - The demo is really difficult. Will the actual game be just as tough?

A - In the actual game release, there will be 3 difficulty levels to choose from. The lowest difficulty will be suitable for gamers who are more keen on being able to complete the game and understand the story plot without going through too much of a challenge. The highest difficulty will be for players who want to put themselves up for a challenge against tougher monsters and puzzles.



Q - Would Affogato support gamepads?

A - We will do our best! We are trying to work through some kinks at the moment. We started off making the game for the keyboard and mouse. Compared to the gamepad, the keyboard and mouse combo provides more keys and better control when it comes to the coffee making simulation and choosing where you want to go during battle. So it is a bit of a challenge trying to make the game work on the gamepad, but try we will!



Q - Can you tell us more about Arorua City and the people staying in it?

A - Arorua City was originally an ordinary city by the sea. 6 years ago, a fate changing event caused the city to plunge into eternal night and since then, all sorts of people from various walks of life have chosen to come here and call it their home. This includes Affogato who has set up her café here. Besides humans, Arorua also houses lots of Kemonomimi - which are aborigines of this city. The two races live in harmony, albeit with occasional friction.



Q - Why do you use Tarot cards to demonstrate the witches' abilities?

A - We decided to use Tarot cards due to their diversity and large number - 78 to be exact. In Affogato, there are a lot of characters you can summon during battle, hence using Tarot makes sense. Although we are in fact using Tarot, we have avoided calling it that to avoid religious controversy and conflict, hence we now call it Witch Cards.



Q - I understand that the game is going to feature several witches. Can you divulge some information about the abilities of the other girls? Does only Affogato have the ability to enter the deep recesses of a person's mind and soul?

A - Indeed, the game is going to feature several witches apart from Affogato and Sera who are in the demo, and each one of them has her own unique ability. Affogato is the only girl with the ability to enter a person's mind and that makes her the perfect candidate to resolve a person's troubles. We cannot talk about Sera's powers unfortunately, as that would be a spoiler.

However, here's a little snippet of some witches you will meet in the demo!



That's all for Issue #1 of Affogato's Q&A! If you have other burning questions of your own, please feel free to ask them in the comments section below, and do follow us on our socials!

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