Dev Diaries September 7 - Roaster Animations, Roasting Challenges, new screens
Hello everyone, I hope you have been enjoying summer, at least in the northern hemisphere, we have certainly had. Today's update is a little longer than usual, given the last update was in July. Since then, we have implemented the majority of the remaining features for the roasting update. The next milestone will focus on wrapping things up to publish a beta, more information about that further down.
Last time we talked about the progress on the coffee bag creator. We are happy to announce that the creator is now complete, including loading and saving custom designs. This is a feature we really wanted to have; we know making new designs is very cool, but we also wanted to have a way to reuse existing designs to speed up the progress of roasting a new bean, especially if you're going to have a recurring type of roasts like real-world coffee roasters do, or simply a common branding between your beans.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
A nice feature of the bag creator is that it allows you to add custom text to your bag and text representing specific properties of your coffee, like country of origin, flavor and aroma notes, name of the coffee, etc. Every time you load a design with these text elements, they update to match the information of the bean you just roasted. The store logo also works this way, if you decide to change your company's logo to a new one, the new roasted coffees will also have your new logo.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
Another major area that we focused on was roaster animations and sounds. In this milestone, we completed the set of animations and sound effects for the three roasters we are adding to the game. You can see these animations while roasting new beans from the HQ or the store. We are very excited about the result, and we hope you enjoy the soothing sounds of cracking coffee or the calming flow of coffee beans over a cooling tray; as someone commented on the Twitter post, you can almost smell the video.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
We also updated the new roasting screen with more controls. We want to give you all the tools to have fun while roasting; this includes playing with time and pausing to allow you to plan your next move and not get frustrated. You can also see the entire flow of roasting in the following video and the roaster animations once more in action.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
Now, a quick refresh on coffee varieties and how they tie to roasting challenges. When you start roasting your first coffee, you will notice that you won't have access to the rarest higher quality coffee varieties from the start. To become a great roaster and have stellar coffees, you will need to unlock higher-quality coffees. These coffees are unlocked through roasting points that you can obtain by completing roasting challenges.
We are putting a lot of time into this system to ensure that challenges can be exciting and fun to do.
We have two different categories for roasting challenges:
[h3]Milestones:[/h3]
These are your main story, hand-crafted challenges. They tell a story about your progress as a roaster and unlock unique rewards. Those rewards include coffees from new continents, new roasters, and new machines like espressos and brewers.
[h3]Other (name TBD):[/h3]
These challenges are procedurally generated, and the rewards are usually roasting points or money. They can also have an expiration time if they have higher rewards.
All challenges have objectives that can be accomplished by roasting only one coffee or a series of coffees with specific properties. An example of a challenge can be: "Roast a coffee from Africa with 82 points or more." Another example could be "Roast 5 coffees from South America and roast 2 Dark Roast coffees".
We are still working on finishing this system to ensure that all challenges can be completed and are relevant to your current level. We are also adding the option to skip non-milestone challenges if they don't sound exciting or rewarding enough for you.
Challenges are generated in a time-based manner. We are thinking of having only three procedurally generated challenges at a time, so after you complete or skip one of these challenges, a timer will kick in, and a new challenge will be generated after "x" time to fill the spot.
With new properties for coffee and roasting, it was necessary to update the existing beans in the game; previously, these beans only had one important property, quality, represented by a number of stars. Now beans are moving to the new model that is closer to real-life coffee.
Coffee is now graded by a score; customers will have a different expectation for this score depending on the reputation level of your store. Besides the score, we also added information about the flavor notes, origin, and other properties to the original coffee beans and updated the Supply and Brewing screens to reflect these changes. On a game that focuses around coffee, we feel that having more information about the coffee you are selling and roasting will add a new level of realism to the game.
Hopefully, you will learn a bit about the fantastic world of coffee while playing; we've certainly learned a lot while working on the game and have come to appreciate coffee in a very different way.
So, what is next? As you can see, the update is coming together, but we still have a bit of work left to finish it. We are spending the rest of September finishing the roasting challenges system, adding all the new items to the game, implementing the new location missions, and tweaking and playing with the new systems to ensure an excellent experience for the beta. Our plan is to have a beta by mid-October. We always have open betas, so if you want to test out the next update you will be able to, we will have an exact release date for the beta on the next dev diaries.
As always, thank you for playing and supporting the game, we love working on the project, and we hope all the new features will also make you love the game. Thanks for reading this far, and enjoy your coffee.
You can follow us on Twitter @RiffStudios for more updates.
if you love Coffee Shop Tycoon, and want to get some cool new logos for your shop join our discord! 😊
[h2]Join Discord[/h2]
Bag Creator
Last time we talked about the progress on the coffee bag creator. We are happy to announce that the creator is now complete, including loading and saving custom designs. This is a feature we really wanted to have; we know making new designs is very cool, but we also wanted to have a way to reuse existing designs to speed up the progress of roasting a new bean, especially if you're going to have a recurring type of roasts like real-world coffee roasters do, or simply a common branding between your beans.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
A nice feature of the bag creator is that it allows you to add custom text to your bag and text representing specific properties of your coffee, like country of origin, flavor and aroma notes, name of the coffee, etc. Every time you load a design with these text elements, they update to match the information of the bean you just roasted. The store logo also works this way, if you decide to change your company's logo to a new one, the new roasted coffees will also have your new logo.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
Roaster animations
Another major area that we focused on was roaster animations and sounds. In this milestone, we completed the set of animations and sound effects for the three roasters we are adding to the game. You can see these animations while roasting new beans from the HQ or the store. We are very excited about the result, and we hope you enjoy the soothing sounds of cracking coffee or the calming flow of coffee beans over a cooling tray; as someone commented on the Twitter post, you can almost smell the video.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
Updates to the roasting screen
We also updated the new roasting screen with more controls. We want to give you all the tools to have fun while roasting; this includes playing with time and pausing to allow you to plan your next move and not get frustrated. You can also see the entire flow of roasting in the following video and the roaster animations once more in action.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
Roasting Challenges
Now, a quick refresh on coffee varieties and how they tie to roasting challenges. When you start roasting your first coffee, you will notice that you won't have access to the rarest higher quality coffee varieties from the start. To become a great roaster and have stellar coffees, you will need to unlock higher-quality coffees. These coffees are unlocked through roasting points that you can obtain by completing roasting challenges.
We are putting a lot of time into this system to ensure that challenges can be exciting and fun to do.
We have two different categories for roasting challenges:
[h3]Milestones:[/h3]
These are your main story, hand-crafted challenges. They tell a story about your progress as a roaster and unlock unique rewards. Those rewards include coffees from new continents, new roasters, and new machines like espressos and brewers.
[h3]Other (name TBD):[/h3]
These challenges are procedurally generated, and the rewards are usually roasting points or money. They can also have an expiration time if they have higher rewards.
All challenges have objectives that can be accomplished by roasting only one coffee or a series of coffees with specific properties. An example of a challenge can be: "Roast a coffee from Africa with 82 points or more." Another example could be "Roast 5 coffees from South America and roast 2 Dark Roast coffees".
We are still working on finishing this system to ensure that all challenges can be completed and are relevant to your current level. We are also adding the option to skip non-milestone challenges if they don't sound exciting or rewarding enough for you.
Challenges are generated in a time-based manner. We are thinking of having only three procedurally generated challenges at a time, so after you complete or skip one of these challenges, a timer will kick in, and a new challenge will be generated after "x" time to fill the spot.
New bean screens
With new properties for coffee and roasting, it was necessary to update the existing beans in the game; previously, these beans only had one important property, quality, represented by a number of stars. Now beans are moving to the new model that is closer to real-life coffee.
Coffee is now graded by a score; customers will have a different expectation for this score depending on the reputation level of your store. Besides the score, we also added information about the flavor notes, origin, and other properties to the original coffee beans and updated the Supply and Brewing screens to reflect these changes. On a game that focuses around coffee, we feel that having more information about the coffee you are selling and roasting will add a new level of realism to the game.
Hopefully, you will learn a bit about the fantastic world of coffee while playing; we've certainly learned a lot while working on the game and have come to appreciate coffee in a very different way.
What we are working on and Beta
So, what is next? As you can see, the update is coming together, but we still have a bit of work left to finish it. We are spending the rest of September finishing the roasting challenges system, adding all the new items to the game, implementing the new location missions, and tweaking and playing with the new systems to ensure an excellent experience for the beta. Our plan is to have a beta by mid-October. We always have open betas, so if you want to test out the next update you will be able to, we will have an exact release date for the beta on the next dev diaries.
As always, thank you for playing and supporting the game, we love working on the project, and we hope all the new features will also make you love the game. Thanks for reading this far, and enjoy your coffee.
You can follow us on Twitter @RiffStudios for more updates.
if you love Coffee Shop Tycoon, and want to get some cool new logos for your shop join our discord! 😊
[h2]Join Discord[/h2]