Dev Diaries March 19 - Roasting, New location, and Discord updates
Hello everyone, welcome to the first post in our series of Dev Diaries, the idea around these diaries is to keep updating you often with all the development news and stories around Coffee Shop Tycoon. This is going to be in the same format as previous announcements, the only difference is that we want to publish them more consistently even if there is nothing super flashy to show to you, on those cases we’ll try to come up with fun stories around development or delve a little into some mechanics and the reasoning behind them. For this week, however, we have some flashy cool things to show to you!
Last month has been super interesting, we have made good progress on the Roasting update and we also spent some time doing virtual activities in the studio, improving our Discord, and updating the store description of Coffee Shop Tycoon.
First, let’s talk about Roasting. If you didn’t know, the next big update will include the ability to roast your own beans, and a new location, plus new machines to brew and grind your coffee to perfection. Now that you know what roasting is let’s talk about this month's progress. This month we finished the “Green bean Generator”! This system is in charge of creating all the varieties of beans that you are going to use for roasting, we have a database of over 1000 coffee beans from around the world! So this system is in charge of reading these beans and adding unique notes depending on the region, in coffee lingo, “notes” refers to the series of flavors and smells you can perceive when drinking coffee, as a roaster you will have the responsibility of extracting these notes to create a rich and tasty cup of coffee. The available coffee beans that you can see in the HQ will depend on your progression, more about that in a bit.
For reference, here are some of the beans that can be generated with this new system.
Another large chunk of this month was allocated to developing internal tools that could help us import and test content faster, specifically the items you can buy and place in your store. When I started developing Coffee Shop Tycoon, I was pretty much an amateur game dev fresh out of college so I didn’t know all the magical benefits of using editor scripts or how to make them. So, every item you see in the game has been configured manually to work with the game systems, this means that I had to import the 3D model, attach some scripts to it, make sure the pivots and colliders are fine, attach some other scripts, change tags and layers for the object, create points that will occupy slots in the game grid, and so on… This process takes around 15 to 20 minutes per object, simply to be able to put it in the world. When you are adding 15 or more new objects you can imagine how that can escalate pretty quickly even without considering human error when applying the configuration. Editor scripts to the rescue! Now after learning the benefits of editor scripts and spending time making them, we can now import and configure the same object in less than a minute, you can see how this will not only make our lives easier but helps us iterate over content a lot faster than we used to. And for the kicker, here is the editor script in action!
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
Now, to art! This month we have been working mostly on polishing the new models and working on the new location. And speaking of the new location, drum roll please…tr tr tr tr tr
Welcome to “Emerald City”, we are happy with how the new location is coming along, we still need to import it in the engine and start adding some nice lighting and game systems to be able to play inside the new building, but the modeling and texturing are ready and we are excited to bring this new place to life and fill it with the energizing aroma of fresh coffee, new machines, and new items. You can follow us on Twitter where we will be posting screenshots while we add the new location to the game or wait for the next dev diaries to see more screenshots.
Now, do you remember we talked about unlocking beans depending on your progression? Well, these next weeks we are working on a feature called “Roasting challenges”. When the new update is out and you head over to your HQ you will see that beans from some regions of the world will be locked, but don’t worry you will be able to unlock beans from all around the world by completing roasting challenges, these challenges will test your roasting skills and yield amazing rewards, an example of a roasting challenge is as follows “Roast a bean from South America with at least 80 points from the Bourbon variety.“ We’ll be sharing more details from this feature along with some screenshots once we have it up and working.
Having a fun place for our community to discuss the game and providing a direct channel to hear about feedback and ideas is important to us, for that reason we also spent some time improving our Discord and adding some new things to welcome new members. Now, when you join the Coffee Shop Tycoon discord you will be able to pick a favorite drink and be assigned to a team where you can get some exclusive in-game logos that you can import and use for your shop, we need some help to reach at least 7000 members in order to make the discord discoverable and public, we are still far from that but hopefully, with your help, we will one day. So, if you love Coffee Shop Tycoon, and want to get some cool new logos join our discord! 😊
[h2]Join Discord[/h2]
A here is a screenshot of the new unique logos!
Finally, another fun virtual activity we had in the studio was a small game jam over the weekend, the idea behind these game jams is to help us learn and come up with fun ideas for this game or future games that we develop, this game jam topic was “Survival”, and we tried to make a survival around sound, here are just some of the screenshots and videos from that day.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
That is all for now, hopefully, you like the new things we are adding to the update, as always let us know what you think here, at Twitter or Discord (join join 😉), have a great weekend and enjoy your coffee.
Last month has been super interesting, we have made good progress on the Roasting update and we also spent some time doing virtual activities in the studio, improving our Discord, and updating the store description of Coffee Shop Tycoon.
Roasting update
First, let’s talk about Roasting. If you didn’t know, the next big update will include the ability to roast your own beans, and a new location, plus new machines to brew and grind your coffee to perfection. Now that you know what roasting is let’s talk about this month's progress. This month we finished the “Green bean Generator”! This system is in charge of creating all the varieties of beans that you are going to use for roasting, we have a database of over 1000 coffee beans from around the world! So this system is in charge of reading these beans and adding unique notes depending on the region, in coffee lingo, “notes” refers to the series of flavors and smells you can perceive when drinking coffee, as a roaster you will have the responsibility of extracting these notes to create a rich and tasty cup of coffee. The available coffee beans that you can see in the HQ will depend on your progression, more about that in a bit.
For reference, here are some of the beans that can be generated with this new system.
Another large chunk of this month was allocated to developing internal tools that could help us import and test content faster, specifically the items you can buy and place in your store. When I started developing Coffee Shop Tycoon, I was pretty much an amateur game dev fresh out of college so I didn’t know all the magical benefits of using editor scripts or how to make them. So, every item you see in the game has been configured manually to work with the game systems, this means that I had to import the 3D model, attach some scripts to it, make sure the pivots and colliders are fine, attach some other scripts, change tags and layers for the object, create points that will occupy slots in the game grid, and so on… This process takes around 15 to 20 minutes per object, simply to be able to put it in the world. When you are adding 15 or more new objects you can imagine how that can escalate pretty quickly even without considering human error when applying the configuration. Editor scripts to the rescue! Now after learning the benefits of editor scripts and spending time making them, we can now import and configure the same object in less than a minute, you can see how this will not only make our lives easier but helps us iterate over content a lot faster than we used to. And for the kicker, here is the editor script in action!
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
Now, to art! This month we have been working mostly on polishing the new models and working on the new location. And speaking of the new location, drum roll please…tr tr tr tr tr
Welcome to “Emerald City”, we are happy with how the new location is coming along, we still need to import it in the engine and start adding some nice lighting and game systems to be able to play inside the new building, but the modeling and texturing are ready and we are excited to bring this new place to life and fill it with the energizing aroma of fresh coffee, new machines, and new items. You can follow us on Twitter where we will be posting screenshots while we add the new location to the game or wait for the next dev diaries to see more screenshots.
Now, do you remember we talked about unlocking beans depending on your progression? Well, these next weeks we are working on a feature called “Roasting challenges”. When the new update is out and you head over to your HQ you will see that beans from some regions of the world will be locked, but don’t worry you will be able to unlock beans from all around the world by completing roasting challenges, these challenges will test your roasting skills and yield amazing rewards, an example of a roasting challenge is as follows “Roast a bean from South America with at least 80 points from the Bourbon variety.“ We’ll be sharing more details from this feature along with some screenshots once we have it up and working.
Discord
Having a fun place for our community to discuss the game and providing a direct channel to hear about feedback and ideas is important to us, for that reason we also spent some time improving our Discord and adding some new things to welcome new members. Now, when you join the Coffee Shop Tycoon discord you will be able to pick a favorite drink and be assigned to a team where you can get some exclusive in-game logos that you can import and use for your shop, we need some help to reach at least 7000 members in order to make the discord discoverable and public, we are still far from that but hopefully, with your help, we will one day. So, if you love Coffee Shop Tycoon, and want to get some cool new logos join our discord! 😊
[h2]Join Discord[/h2]
A here is a screenshot of the new unique logos!
Game Jam
Finally, another fun virtual activity we had in the studio was a small game jam over the weekend, the idea behind these game jams is to help us learn and come up with fun ideas for this game or future games that we develop, this game jam topic was “Survival”, and we tried to make a survival around sound, here are just some of the screenshots and videos from that day.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
That is all for now, hopefully, you like the new things we are adding to the update, as always let us know what you think here, at Twitter or Discord (join join 😉), have a great weekend and enjoy your coffee.