Coffee Shop Tycoon News

Happy Friday, coffee lovers!

Here we are one more day to share with you the best-kept secrets of Coffee Shop Tycoon. Today, in response to a question made by Celticsungod, we’re revealing a very useful one about the custom drinks system. In the previous post of the #Tips&Tricks series, we reviewed the basic elements of this game feature, so now it's the perfect time to dive into a crucial aspect of it: how can you achieve the highest acceptance rate among the audience of your interest during the test round?

If you’re the kind of player who enjoys doing the math to optimize your results in tycoon games, the following explanation is going to be like a walk in an amusement park for you.

• In order to calculate each target customer’s reaction to your recipe, the game measures how Sweet, Bitter, and Sour your new drink is. These variables are related to the ingredients you choose and in what proportion you add them. Generally speaking, it could be said that teenagers love sweet drinks, experts prefer the bitter taste of traditional coffee and casuals have no clear preference.
  

• In Coffee Shop Tycoon, the taste is determined by a range of values associated with the flavors mentioned above. This range is different for Teenagers and Experts, while the Casual audience will value all three in the same way.
  
  1. Teens: Bitter (0 - 32), Sweet (60 - 100), Sour (0 - 60)
     
  2. Casuals: Bitter (0 - 50), Sweet (0 - 50), Sour (0 - 50)
     
  3. Experts: Bitter (50 - 90), Sweet (0 - 30), Sour (0 - 20)
     
  Based on this scale, the game will assign the drink a certain amount of points.
  

• These points will get multiplied by a fixed number to calculate the final score of the drink:
  
  1. Teens: Bitter (0.8), Sweet (1.4), Sour (0.8)
     
  2. Casuals: Bitter (1), Sweet (1), Sour (1)
     
  3. Experts: Bitter (1.4), Sweet (0.8), Sour (0.8)
     

If the result for Bitter, Sweet, and Sour falls within your target customer’s range of values, the drink will score well. Here is a practical example:

• Drink A has the following values: Bitter (24), Sweet (70), Sour (45).
  
• This is what we get after using the multipliers:
  
  
  1. Teens: Bitter (19.2), Sweet (98), Sour (36). Perfect for them!
     
  2. Casuals: Bitter (24), Sweet (70), Sour (45). Too sweet.
     
  3. Experts: Bitter (33.6), Sweet (56), Sour (36). Less bitter than it should be.
     

It is also important to mention that the customers having a coffee in your HQ will use the average number within their range to evaluate it. For example, taking the values we used first, we would find this:

• Teens: Bitter (16), Sweet (80), Sour (30)
  
• Casuals: Bitter (25), Sweet (25), Sour (25)
  
• Experts: Bitter (70), Sweet (15), Sour (10)
  

Mother of God, what a serious headache! Making a tycoon video game is no mean feat, and explaining the system to other people... can be even more so. Anyway, we hope it helps you create even more successful drinks in the near future. If there's any further detail you want to discuss, feel free to leave a comment here, open a Discussion thread or join our community server on Discord. We’ll always be happy to learn about you!

Enjoy your next coffee!
Riff Studios

Hello there, coffee lovers!

Welcome back to Coffee Shop Tycoon’s development blog. Today, we’ll be sharing new tips that will take your business one step closer to the top of the worldwide coffee shop industry. This time, the lesson revolves around staff management.

For those of you who have just arrived at Coffee Shop Tycoon, each new store will demand three job roles to be covered: the cashier, the barista, and the roaster. However, opening a new shop is pretty expensive and you probably will look for the cheapest way to move forward, which sometimes results in low salaries and multitasking.

It's a secret to no one that the hospitality industry tends to reproduce these bad practices toward its workers. We wanted this as a feature in the game as well as to be as realistic as possible. That’s why, on one hand, ignoring their needs has a negative impact on their productivity and may lead to them quitting their jobs. On the other hand, we linked their happiness to certain performance and creativity boosts that will help to increase the reputation of the shop.



Considering what we’ve just exposed, here’s a list of facts and suggestions that may help you to manage your staff correctly.

• Each time your employees level up, the game will require you to decide whether or not to give them a raise. The current wage will always be under each worker’s salary expectations, so we strongly recommend you adhere to it to avoid carrying with it a performance debuff until the next time you can readjust the amount.
  
• Each extra dollar you pay to them increases their efficiency by 0.03%, with a maximum boost of 20% extra productivity. In the same way, there will also be a -0.03% performance for every dollar you decide to save by dropping their salary below the expected amount. Plus, the penalty can reach -30%.
  
• In case you exceed the salary expectations, you will have to choose a value from the recommended range based on your employees’ mastery of the four benchmark areas of the game (Barista, Service, Roaster, Speed). In other words, the more you train them, the higher their wages will be.
  
• Make sure that no one does more than their share. The more different roles they play (e.g: Cashier + Barista), the worse the result will be in all of them.
  

At this point in development, job quitting has no consequences beyond the loss of time and money that training a new worker entails. However, we've been kicking around the idea that it affects the reputation of the shop for a limited time. Also, how would you think about implementing a salary boost when a shop raises its reputation (i.e. after obtaining the Golden Bean)? Let us know what you think in the comments section.

Thank you for spending another Friday with us. Leave your questions or doubts in the comments section so that we can answer them whenever possible. Alternatively, you can use our Discord server to discuss anything related to the game — or just chat with us about your favourite coffee variety, that’s something we usually do there!

Your next coffee is on us, enjoy the weekend!
The Riff Studios team

Welcome back, coffee lovers:

A new, fascinating Monthly coffee appreciation post is here for your relish. Today we’ll be sharing some curious facts about the rarest coffee varieties in the world. Some of these exclusive coffee varieties have a very peculiar scatological origin you may have never imagined, so despite it being a pretty interesting topic we strongly recommend not to read the full article on a full stomach — you’ve been warned!



Let’s get down to business with a proven fact: if the “scatological origin” you’re thinking about consists of animals eating fresh coffee beans and defecating the seeds that will be later washed, dried, and roasted… your thoughts are accurate. This kind of coffee is pretty popular because the digestive process of some mammals and birds alters the chemistry of the seeds, which also changes the taste of this fine variety. that just a few privileged people can afford to taste. We just hope the washing is really, really thorough.

Among these varieties of defecated coffee, the most popular one is the kopi luwak made in Sumatra and other areas of Indonesia with the help of palm civets. These animals are not particularly selective about the type of cherries they eat, but those who feed them to produce kopi luwak usually provide them with Arabica coffee cherries because they are perceived to be of higher quality.

The same goes for the variety produced by elephants in the Thai province of Surin, named Black Ivory. The community of Ban Ta Klang village feeds these amazing pachyderms as they take profit from them as tourist attractions and coffee makers. It is surprising that it is still being produced today, given that, in the words of its creator Blake Dinkin, “it takes 33 kilograms of raw coffee cherries to produce 1 kilo of Black Ivory Coffee".



The resulting beverage has a smooth and less acidic taste than other coffee varieties, so it rarely needs any sweetener. Regarding the price, a cup of Black Ivory coffee usually costs more than $60, so it’s only served in luxury hotels and expensive gourmet restaurants. In the case of kopi luwak, you may expect a similar price.

Now, we have to talk about Kona Coffee grown on the volcanic slopes of Hawaii. Kona cherries are grown in very special weather with light winds, sunny mornings, and rainy or cloudy afternoons. They’re picked, dried, and roasted by hand, so it all gives the final product a sweet, fruity, and mildly acid flavor you can’t find anywhere else. Depending on where you order it, a cup of Kona Coffee may cost between $1 and $15.



Last but not least, there’s the famous Jamaica Blue Mountain, which is both a designation of its origin and bean variety. Its coffee tree is grown in the Blue Mountain region between Kingston and Port Antonio. The low acidity and sweet taste of the resulting drink, which might be compared to dark chocolate, make it very popular in Japan. Interestingly, 75% of its worldwide production ends up in the Japanese market, something that is visible even in other well-known games such as the Yakuza series and Persona 5. This variety is available in many coffee shops around the world, but prepare yourself to pay around $10 per cup.



That’s all for today! In our next Monthly appreciation coffee post, we’ll have an interesting conversation about 5 lessons we learned about the coffee shop industry that were pretty useful to creating Coffee Shop Tycoon. In the meantime, we invite you to keep enjoying your business adventures in the game, share your ideas in the comment section and join our Discord server to chat with us from time to time.

See you next week, enjoy your coffee!
The Riff Studios team

Hello there, coffee entrepreneurs!

Welcome to this new article in the #Tips&Tricks series, in which today we will cover the seasonal drinks system, its relationship to market trends and consumer expectations, and the consequences that a good or bad choice of ingredients will have on the reputation of your business. Soon you'll realize that, despite its complexity, this feature is quite easy to understand!



Seasonal drinks include products that people believe to be appropriate for each season of the year, like eggnog in Winter or flowers in Spring. Once the lab at your headquarters is unlocked, you’ll be able to create lots of them by mixing several types of base drinks, syrups, and toppings. Some ingredients of these categories will be suitable for all the year, but others will turn your creation into a seasonal drink. You’ll realize that after seeing the icon that will appear on the top right corner of the screen.



You'll notice up to four different icons there depending on the seasonal ingredients you've added to your drink, but keep in mind that you'll have to choose a prevailing season before finishing the process. Any seasonal effect the other ingredients may have will disappear. This is a feature of the game that you will have to master since customers may request the craziest combinations ever seen. And this is where trends come into play!



From a certain point in the game, you will be presented with challenges associated with ingredients that have become fashionable. You can let the opportunity go, but if your competitors get ahead of you, a reputation debuff will be applied and you will be visited by fewer consumers for a certain period of time. But if you take the chance to feature a new special beverage, there might come a day when a lot of people decide to visit your shop. It all depends on your capacity to hit the nail on the head!

Another factor to consider is the temperature expected for each drink. In both spring and summer, customers will prefer colder beverages; and in fall and winter, you'd better serve them warm and smoking!



But it doesn't end there! We still have to tell you about the pre-market testing of the new beverages. When your drink is ready to go, you will test it with a representative sample of each target audience: that is, young people, casual consumers, and coffee experts. The rating of each group will tell you who has liked it, and which people would rather drink sewage water than take another sip of your new idea.

It’s pretty usual to prioritize one target audience or another according to the type of clients you expect to come to your business — this is one of the aspects of your empire you’ll have to manage shop by shop to obtain the best result possible! And remember that if you want to take advantage of this to modify your user base, a paid marketing campaign will be the ideal complement.

And… that’s all for today, folks! However, if you have any questions in this regard, we are available to answer them. It may take a while, as we are busy preparing the new major update for June, which will bring options to set the individual price of drinks. You can learn more about this topic in the announcement we dedicated to Coffee Shop Tycoon’s roadmap.

Leave your comment here, or join our server on Discord to stay in touch with us!

Enjoy your next coffee,
Riff Studios

Hello there, coffee lovers!

Welcome to this new installment of our Monthly Coffee Appreciation Post. A few weeks ago, we embarked on a short trip through space and time to investigate the origins of our favourite beverage. We’ll eventually unveil its history up to the present day, but today we are going to talk about the most common varieties of coffee beans around the world.


[h3]ARABICA[/h3]
Let’s begin with an easy one — the “arabica” (coffea arabica). We bet you’ve heard the name a thousand times since it’s one of the two primary coffee varieties grown on Earth. It is believed to be discovered in Ethiopia and then brought to Yemen for widespread farming, trade, and consumption by humans.

To be cultivated in the best conditions, this coffee species must grow at high altitudes in well-shaded areas where rainfalls are common. The need for such specific conditions, together with its delicacy in face of adverse weather conditions makes it difficult and expensive to grow, so its beans are usually very expensive. But you know the fun part? Almost 60% of the worldwide production of coffee is arabica!

Despite its name, this variety is no longer limited to East Africa and Arabia. Now you can find the arabica beans in other areas characterised by a tropical climate. These ones are always close to the equator. I.e.: Colombia, Brazil, Guatemala, Vietnam, Indonesia, China, Java… If you want to learn more about the production by country of origin, we invite you to check this index out.




[h3]ROBUSTA[/h3]
This is another powerful name among the most common varieties of coffee beans in the world since 30% or 40% of the world’s coffee beans production comes from coffea canephora. It was discovered in Uganda, where it was said to be a fundamental part of the Kwanjula marriage ceremony, where the bride’s father must serve dried beans in the hands of the groom for him to chew the fruits as a sign of acceptance.

Once again the colonisation process led by the Netherlands takes the centre stage: they learned about these exceptional seeds and exported them from Africa to Asian countries such as India, Sri Lanka (then known as Ceylon), and Java. They also can be found in countries like Vietnam, Brazil, Germany, Italy, and the US nowadays.

The robusta seeds could be farmed in lower heights and very humid places, and they’re very resistant to adverse weather conditions, which makes them easier to produce than arabica. It doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a low-quality coffee! If we attend to its caffeine content, which is the substance that activates us every morning, robusta beans are clearly superior. As arabica beans contain between 1.1% to 1.5% caffeine in their composition, robusta almost doubles these percentages to between 2% to 2.5%.



In terms of flavour, arabica offers a light, fruity taste that makes it more enjoyable to drink than a 100% robusta coffee, which flavour is less complex and harsh. That’s why you’ll usually find many varieties of arabica than varieties of robusta in the market.


We’re impatient to tell you about the less known varieties and how the bean varieties are mixed to create new flavours, but that will have to wait a bit more! For now, it would make us happy to know that you enjoyed this content, and which topics you expect us to cover in the future. Remember we have a Discord server for Coffee Shop Tycoon community members to chit-chat about our favourite drink, how to play the game and any other related topics that might be of our common interest.



The next cup of hot coffee is on us, have a great weekend!
Riff Studios