Coffee Shop Tycoon News

The time has finally come, and the Beta for the roasting update is out now for Windows! The Mac version will be released next week as we still need to do more playtesting. Before I talk about any of the juicy details of the update and what you can expect from us over the following weeks, I want to go over an important topic, game saves.



Your game save will work with the Beta of the Roasting update, and your progress will not be lost once the full update is out. However, a save that has been upgraded to the roasting update v0.8.0 can't be used in the old version of Coffee Shop Tycoon, trying to do so will reset the save without warning. We know that this is not ideal, and unfortunately, the old version works like this, but we will improve this going forward and warn players about unsupported game saves.

For now, if you play the Beta, please stay on the beta branch until the update is fully released, otherwise, you can potentially lose your progress. If you want to keep a copy of your game save, you can follow these steps. That way, if you want to go back to the non-beta build, you can use that backup to restore your old save. That save will not include any of your progress while playing the Beta.

On Windows, go to this path, and copy all the folder contents to a safe location.
C:/Users//AppData/LocalLow/Riff Studios/Coffee Shop Tycoon/

On Mac, go to this path, and copy the folder contents to a safe location.
~/Library/Application Support/Riff Studios/Coffee Shop Tycoon/



With that out of the way, let's go over some simple steps to enable the Beta.
Go into your library, select Coffee Shop Tycoon, click on the settings icon, and select Properties.



From there, go to the beta tab and select Beta from the dropdown.





The Beta is pretty much the Roasting Update minus a few things we are still working on and some extra bugs 😊. Once you install the latest version, your first question is probably going to be, how do I start roasting? Like many other features in the game, Roasting is unlocked by completing missions, precisely, the mission to own another company on Akihabara. If you have completed that mission before or if you complete it after getting the update, you will see a message notifying you about the new Roasting area in the HQ, here you will be able to start your roasting adventure.



Akihabara has some graphical improvements for the cherry blossoms in the park and three additional objectives. If you have already completed this store or if you have already unlocked it before, you won't see these new objectives, but that won't prevent you from unlocking Roasting.

The three new objectives are:
• Create a roasting profile
• Buy a Roaster
• Roast coffee in your store

As mentioned before, this store is where you will be able to unlock Roasting.



Once Roasting is unlocked, you will see this new space in your HQ. From here, you can see all the available beans from all over the world that you can roast, along with the bean varieties, roasting challenges, and information about the different continents. There are no tutorials in the Beta about Roasting, but we are working on adding them to the update.



You will probably want to start by creating your first roasting profile. This is a sort of recipe that your employees can use in the store to roast the coffee that you want to sell. Select the employee with a high roasting skill and start roasting. Only employees with this skill or higher will be able to roast the coffee in your store.



On the next screen, you will be able to play with the roaster and try to achieve different flavor notes for your coffee.



Once you are happy with your roast, you can go over to the coffee bag creator, where you can set your imagination free and create an exciting design for your coffee.



Finishing this process will create a roasting profile that can be used from your store to delight your customers with your unique coffee.



Green coffee can expire and run out of stock, so be aware of this before creating a roasting profile for a coffee that will expire soon.



Depending on your new roasting profile, you will potentially complete roasting challenges that have different rewards. Milestone challenges unlock unique rewards like new machines and world regions, while other challenges can give you money or roasting points.



Currently, there is only one milestone challenge in the Beta, but we will be adding more challenges to unlock the complete set of machines in the following weeks.

Roasting points are a new currency that you can use to buy new bean varieties and roast high-quality coffee. Unlocking varieties and continents will give you more options to choose from when roasting coffee. Asia is the first continent that is unlocked by default. New continents will be unlocked with milestone challenges that we'll be adding during the Beta.



Now that you have a unique coffee, go back to any of your stores and buy a roaster. You can reassign any of your employees to the roaster or hire a new employee with better roasting skill.
Click on the roaster, here you can roast your new coffee.



After roasting, your coffee will appear on your Supply screen like any other coffee, and you can use it from your Brewer or Espresso as always.



Coffee quality is no longer defined by stars and is now using the real-world grading scale for quality. Depending on your store reputation, customers will have different expectations about your coffee quality.



Machines also have a new property, "Max brewing quality," that is replacing the old "Quality" property. If you are roasting amazing coffee, also remember to have amazing machines. Otherwise, your customers will not be able to enjoy your coffee fully.





Roasting is now crucial to increase your store reputation. After reaching Bronze-Bean, you will need to sell coffee with good grading to level up. We are also adding a new reputation level called Diamond-Bean.



For the Beta, you will need to unlock the Siphon Brewer to brew coffee with 85 points and increase your reputation to Silver-Bean. For Golden-Bean and Diamond-Bean, we are still working on adding the milestone challenges that will unlock the machines necessary to reach these ratings.



The new location with all its missions is now available after completing Akihabara. The mission objectives for this location focus on roasting coffee, completing roasting challenges, and unlocking bean varieties. Everything but the last objective can be completed at this point. The final objective is to unlock the four continents. This is going to be possible when we add the remaining milestone challenges.





Last but not least, you can expect to see many new items to decorate your store, including plants, three new concrete floors, new tables, chairs, a new working station with four airpot slots, new sugar tables to match each working station, and many more things. All of which are available in the Beta. Check out some of the new items you can buy for your store.





Now let's go over some of the things missing in the Beta that we will add over the following weeks.

• More Milestone roasting challenges to unlock all the new content.
  
• Tutorials for Roasting.
  
• Story introduction to 5th store.
  
• New help sections.
  
• New achievements.
  
• Balancing changes.
  
• UI sounds.
  
• Option to speed up roast results animations.
  
• Improvements to employee roaster selection screen (grouping employees by store).
  
• Notification when completing a roasting challenge.
  
• Bug fixes.
  

• Some bean properties like long names and processes can overlap other UI elements.
  
• Animations on roasting challenge screen replay after a challenge is created or completed.
  
• Employee information screen does not refresh after training completes or employee levels up.
  

We will be streaming live on Sunday at 12pm PDT over Steam. You will be able to find the stream simply by going to the game store page or your library. We will be talking about the new features of the game and answering any questions. You can post questions on our Discord or over Twitter.

We hope that you enjoy playing the Beta, and please let us know any problem or feedback you have. As always, enjoy your coffee and happy roasting!

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]

Hello everyone! Pumpkins are out, and ghosts are starting to haunt our office, but we have tried to ignore them, throw coffee at them and pretend that there is not a psycho killer behind us, everything we can to keep making steady progress! And we are back with another dev diaries. This is the last update before we release the beta next Friday! Yeah! You heard it. We have finally completed the features necessary for the beta! We are currently playing the update and fixing any lingering bugs while tweaking the challenges and rewards. The balance of these new mechanics will probably not be perfect for the beta, but we hope to hear your feedback and, together, get the full update out by November.

With the beta release announcement next week, we will also talk about what work is remaining for the full update and what you will be able to do in the beta.

Now let’s talk about what we have been doing since our last update.



This month we finished configuring and adding all the new items and machines to the game. We are especially excited by the new decoration options and the new additions to espressos and brewers. We also finished configuring the three rosters, animating all the machines, and adding all the remaining descriptions. Check out some of the new items!



There are many more items, but you will have to discover them in-game; we are trying to keep some surprises for next week ;)



Historically on Coffee Shop Tycoon, you can unlock items by leveling up, buying companies, or doing researches, now we are adding another way to unlock new items.

With the addition of roasting challenges, we decided to have the new higher-level machines and roasters locked behind what we call a Milestone Challenge. You will complete these challenges by creating new roasting profiles in your HQ. These milestones are also tied with the coffee varieties and coffee regions. Milestones will be increasingly more challenging and will help you become a professional roaster.





Speaking of challenges, the system is now fully functional. We have been roasting and completing challenges all week long. We plan to keep doing this and tweaking the difficulty and rewards next week. We are also working on the first Milestone Challenge that will unlock a new machine when you start playing the beta. We will keep adding more milestone challenges through the beta period until they cover all the new machines and the four coffee regions.





We have talked about varieties before and even showcased the screen a couple of updates ago; with this latest push, we are also adding the world coffee screen. On this screen, you can get an overview of what coffee varieties are available in each continent and what coffee notes you can expect per continent. You will start with one continent unlocked, and as you progress through the world of roasting, you will get the chance to complete new Milestone missions to unlock the remaining regions.





Another change coming to the game is the addition of a final reputation level, Diamond Bean. This is the next tier after Golden Bean, and to unlock it, you will need to sell coffee in your store with an exceptional grading. This new mechanic is also required to achieve Silver Bean and Gold Bean.

Each rating has a different coffee grading requirement, starting with 85 to achieve Silver Bean, 90 for Golden Bean, and 95 for Diamond Bean. For each level, you will need to sell at least 20 coffees with this grading. Hopefully, you keep an exceptional service since you will need to sell the coffee again in case you lose your reputation level, but don’t worry, this is just a requirement for the top reputation levels.





You might have amazing baristas in your team, but to brew great coffee, you also need great equipment. For that reason, we are introducing a new stat for your brewers and espressos, Max Brewing Quality. You can brew any coffee in any machine, but it will not realize its full potential unless you have the right equipment. You will get a notification if it is time to upgrade your machines. The machine stats will reduce the coffee grading until you get a better machine, so better to be ready with adequate equipment when roasting amazing beans.

This grading is important because your customers now expect a different coffee grading depending on your reputation. This expectation is slightly different between customers, but overall higher reputation means higher demands.



As you can see, roasting is crucial to having a successful store and becoming the ultimate coffee connoisseur!

We are excited to finally start sharing this update with you and hear about all your thoughts and suggestions.



As a final surprise, we plan to stream a gameplay session and talk about some of the new mechanics and answer any questions you may have, we don’t have the exact date and time right now, but we will update you once we do.

Thank you for reading this far, and we hope to see you next week for all the instructions about how to download the beta and all the information about it, plus more details about the stream. As always, 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]

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]

Hello everyone! I hope you are enjoying a cold brew this summer in the northern hemisphere or a velvety latte this winter in the southern hemisphere. Wherever you are, we wanted to share with you more news around the development of the latest update and talk about the new mechanics.



The roasting mechanic is now also working inside the stores and has a new icon. Once you have purchased a new roaster, you can assign an employee to it. This will allow you to roast any roasting profile created from the HQ as long as the beans are still fresh and available. Like brewing, roasting takes some time; after the roast is complete, the new custom coffee will appear in your inventory, and you will be able to brew it like any other coffee. Custom coffee will have better grades than the ones you can purchase, and they will be less expensive to produce; additionally, higher reputation levels like Bronze Bean, Silver Bean, and Gold Bean will now be tied with custom coffee because let’s be honest if you are a trending and fantastic coffee shop you might as well create your own coffee. 😊





This month we also made tremendous progress with the new screens. The brand-new Green Beans screen showcases the properties of the coffee beans you can use to create new roasting profiles from the HQ. These beans will change depending on which varieties and regions you unlock; they will also refresh constantly unless you make a roasting profile for them. When you create a roasting profile, the selected beans will be around until you finish roasting all the stock, or they become too old to roast.



Speaking of coffee varieties, we also added a screen where you can unlock new varieties with roasting points. Varieties are crucial to complete roasting challenges which reward you with Roasting Points that you can use to unlock more varieties or roast high-quality beans. The expected quality of each variety defines different tiers; not all varieties will create highly rated coffees. Still, they will work as stepping stones to progress your roasting skills.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Another new screen is the roasting hub, here you can check out the roasting profiles you have created, check the roasting challenge you are currently tracking, see information about how many regions and varieties you have unlocked, and finally create a new roasting profile. This is the main screen you will see when interacting with the new roasting department in your HQ.





Another primary system that we want to show you is the coffee bag creator! This creator is your final step for showcasing your coffee. For the past weeks, we started working with an artist (you can follow here on Twitter at @nynydg) to create different shapes and patterns that you can use when designing a coffee bag; here are some of the designs and explorations.



She came up with 80 different shapes and patterns that you will be able to use to customize your bag; all these elements can have custom colors and combine with text to show your brand and the name of your roasted coffee. All these shapes live in layers that combine like an image editing software so you can rearrange their order and overlap them to create unique designs. Without further ado, here is the bag creator in action.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

We are still working on adding support for text and different fonts, recent colors for the color picker, and the ability to save and load your bag designs. We are very excited about how it is turning out, and we hope you are too when you start roasting and selling your own coffee.



Last but not least, we are also working on a powerful system that will support the roasting challenges. This system is flexible enough to be used for the missions currently in the game and any future games that we develop. The idea behind the system is to be able to define a set of requirements to complete a challenge that can be done in steps or at the same time and provide a reward if all the conditions are met. The system also supports having a sequence of challenges, similar to what you can see now on the current missions in the game. We are still testing this system. Given it is not a visual-facing feature, we only have the following debugging screens, but we are excited about how this will allow us to create interesting roasting challenges for you.





Thanks for reading this far and supporting the game. We can’t wait for you to play the new update, we are doing everything to get it in your hands as fast as possible. Thanks for being patient and sticking with us, we hope you have an amazing week 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]

[h3]Enjoy this summer discovering how to run a coffee shop, turn on your Brewers and warm up your water, Coffee Shop Tycoon is on sale until July 8th! Get 40% off![/h3]



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]