Coffee Shop Tycoon News

Hello everyone, a new version is available for beta testing, this update is focused on fixing some annoying bugs and also has a lot of work that will take Coffee Shop Tycoon to new audiences in the future. I'll start by talking about the bugs that were recently fixed and the two major changes that I've been working on during the past two months. Finally, I will share some exciting news about the music of the game.


Wow, switching a legacy path-finding system on a released game is really annoying but I think I'm seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. A little history behind path-finding, the game used to have a grid like navigation system, when you placed a chair or a table an area of the grid would be blocked and customers walked around the obstacles, this worked great but it was a very limited system, it didn't really support things like putting tables against walls, or expanding stores. For that reason, I switched to the NavMesh system provided by Unity, this basically calculates a walkable area using the actual 3D models of the objects and a customizable humanoid shape. This new system really opened the doors for a lot of the features and improvements I have added lately, but it came at a cost, now that you can be more flexible moving things around and expanding shops, it is more likely for customer to get stuck. The problem is that the customers in your store are not super smart, so in some cases they don't know what to do when a table is blocked or they end up in weird spots.

For this update I spent a long time looking at these flaws and finding ways to fix them. I don't think the system is perfect yet but it certainly handles most cases gracefully so you should not be seeing those annoying bubbles over your customer's heads that often, here is a comparison of the changes.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

As you can see in the video, customers looking for a new table would get stuck if selected table was blocked, and customers that were on their way to a table that was previously reachable would also remain stuck if something blocked the path. Now with the changes, customers have a way to detect if tables are reachable and leave or find another table if that is not the case. Customers now also navigate directly to chairs instead of the middle of tables which should fix other similar bugs. The colliders of all tables were also updated to account for these changes.


Another feature that I consider very important for the future of the game, and something that needs to get done before the game keeps growing is localization. The game was not designed with this in mind and I have gradually learned new best practices and how to better support multiple languages. During these months I have worked on building a language system for the game and extracting all in-game text from code, I was able to finish this first phase and have extracted over 400 lines of text. The remaining text that needs to be localized lives in some text resources like the store's furniture and drinks catalog, and UI controls. After I'm done extracting those, I will have a text file that translators can use to provide new languages to the game. Since this update has changed quite a lot of places that handle text, please report any bugs you see related with text, especially if you see text that looks like this "boost.rivalTrend.title", these are strings used to identify localized text, so if you see those instead of the actual text, something is not working.


Another big item that needed work was switching the Unity version used by the game. There are many problems that are caused by bugs in the engine code, especially crashes. Targeting an old engine version was also bringing a lot of problems when building for Mac, as the backwards compatibility between macOS and old Unity builds is pretty terrible. Now that Coffee Shop Tycoon uses a pretty recent Unity build, I will be able to use the latest tools for building the game, support more platforms, and hopefully have less problems with random crashes caused by the engine.


As part of the engine update, the launch window where you can select the game graphics settings is going away. Instead, you can now change the resolution from the settings menu in the game.


As some of you may know already, there is new original music coming to the game! The current music used in the game is under a Creative Commons license and is not original music. Chris A. Yenney will be the composer behind the music of Coffee Shop Tycoon, he is currently working on the new songs and I am looking forward to sharing them with you when they are ready, follow Chris on twitter (@chrisayenney) where you can find more about his awesome work.

I'm going to be working on polishing this build and getting it ready to go out of beta, meanwhile if you find any issues while playing the beta please post your problem under the pinned thread, I will be taking special attention to those bugs and getting them resolved before the beta is over.

As always thanks for all your support, and enjoy your coffee.

Follow me on twitter (@RiffStudios) for more updates, and feel free to DM me if you are having issues or simply if you are having fun with the game.

Hello everyone! After completely formatting my mac, rolling back to the fabric macOS, and reinstalling everything, I was able to build Coffee Shop Tycoon for Mac! I hope everyone enjoys the new update and start creating some cool Spring drinks!

You can read the Full announcement here.



Stay safe and enjoy your coffee.

Hello everyone! I hope you are ok in these complicated times. I have been working to bring you a small Spring update, having been quarantined at home for the past month has given me extra time to work on the game and hopefully you will enjoy the new changes.


I’ve heard your feedback about the lack of Spring ingredients for the drink creator, this update adds 4 new ingredients, allowing you to finally create Spring drinks! Two of the new ingredients, honey, and honey swirls are available right away, while edible flowers and wild berry syrup are unlocked with the Creative Barista research.




While this is not really visible as a player, every notification and message in the game is now using a new simplified system, I’ve been wanting to do this for a while as it was a mess every time I needed to add new dialogs and messages, this change will simplify adding new content and it was needed in order to support multiple languages and localization.


This has not been requested yet, but I though it was really needed. You have probably come across a time where you bought a table and now you wanted to put chairs around it, to simplify buying the same item multiple times I added a button to the right of the screen a while ago. Now with this update, this button also has a hotkey, so pressing “B” will act as clicking the button allowing you to buy things way faster.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]


The drink evaluation process in the HQ is way faster now, the three judges drink the coffee at the same time and give their score together.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]


Now all drink boosts are relative to the season of the menu you are currently modifying, so if the current season is Spring but you are modifying your Winter menu, all boosts will be as if Winter was the current season. This is probably the way it should have worked in the first place but I guess better late than never.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]


The impact percentage that appeared in the “Market” category of a featured drink was not really helpful, I changed this percentage to a description instead, “Market” basically tells you If the drink you are featuring resonates with the market of your shop, and affects how much hype is created. So, if your market is mostly teen customers, launching a drink targeted to teens will have a higher hype.




And finally, some bug fixes.

• Airpots could appear as in use with zero coffee, this was caused by replacing you working station while a brewing process was active.
  
• Fixed a problem where an out of season drink effect was not properly shown in the customer information.
  
• Fixed a case where navigation arrows were visible in the store category page.
  
• Fixed a problem where the shop’s 3D name could block the customers’ paths in Akihabara.
  
• Adding missing syrups to the syrup bottles visible over the working stations.
  

The roadmap stays the same, I will also probably add "Upgrading the game to the latest Unity version", as that should prevent the issues with mac and will also update to the latest pathfinding system which should fix some of the issues that are being reported.

• More locations and mechanics
  
• Cloud Saves
  
• Steam Workshop support
  
• More Achievements
  
• Support for more languages
  
• Help Section
  
• Optimizations
  

As always thank you for all your support, and enjoy your coffee.

Hello, update v0.6 is live now! This has been one of the most challenging updates to develop so far, but hopefully you will enjoy all the new things that were added to the game. This update expands the game in many ways, it adds a new location with new challenges, improves existing systems, and adds rival companies with cool rewards.


Akihabara is the 4th location of Coffee Shop Tycoon, inspired by the real location in Tokyo and other cities like Osaka and Kyoto. This new location is one of a kind as it allows you to build your coffee shop on top of a building, the available expansion unlocks a nice rooftop area where your customers can enjoy the views of the city and a cherry blossom park below. Prove your management skills on this new location, and help Akari turn this shop into a trending spot.



[h3]New Items[/h3]
You will also find many new items inspired by Japanese culture ready to turn your store into a unique and interesting place.



[h3]New Ingredient[/h3]
If that is not enough you can also brew new drinks using matcha, to delight any customer on your new shop.




Another major feature is "Rival Companies". These AI controlled companies will grow along you and try to become the best coffee shop around, thankfully these are public companies so anyone can buy their stocks, that includes you!



Try to make wise investments and buy stocks from promising companies. The stock price from these companies will change over time depending on the companies' value, this gives you a chance to gain profits by buying and selling stocks or simply by waiting for the company to pay dividends. Beware, companies might go bankrupt any time, so look after your investments.



Some companies have unique logos and rewards that you can unlock by buying out the company.



If you choose so, you can sell a company that you own and recover the value of stocks and any money in that company's bank. But you won't be able to receive any more dividends from that company.




With the addition of rival companies, the trending system has been updated. When an ingredient is trending, launching a featured drink with that ingredient will start a popularity boost.



Failing to react to a trend can allow other companies to take advantage and launch a trending drink of their own, this will impact your store's reputation and give you a negative popularity boost.




Nine new achievements are available for you to unlock! Prove you are a true tycoon by getting all of them!




With all the new items to unlock the max level you can reach has been increased to level 10.


There are other minor improvements that are part of this update.

• A new banner was added to keep track of ongoing market balance campaigns from your store, useful for one of the objectives of the new store.
  
  
  
  
• Solved a bug where non existing ingredients showed up as trending, like 'Candy Dust' or 'Strawberry'
  
• Improved pathfinding will prevent customers from getting stuck in most situations.
  
• Fixed a bug that prevented placing wall decorations in some corners.
  
• Fixed some race condition crashes.
  

This was a major update of the game but won't be the last, I have more plans for new locations and more interesting features and content, you can follow me on twitter @riffstudios to know more about the development of new features and updates. Thank you for all the support you have given me as it has helped me to keep working on the game, as always, I'm open to all your feedback and I will be looking closely for any bug reports.


Finally, this is a list of some of the new things I have in mind for future updates, I will be giving more details as I make progress on the next update.

• More locations and mechanics
  
• Cloud Saves
  
• Steam Workshop support
  
• More Achievements
  
• Support for more languages
  
• Help Section
  
• Optimizations
  

Enjoy your coffee.

Hello everyone! If you have been following the development of v0.6 you may know that the list of remaining work has been getting significantly shorter every week, today I'm very happy to announce that the work for the update is complete! The final part of the update is live and you can play it by selecting the beta branch.

This last update fixes important pathfinding bugs, and adds the final pieces of content, specifically two more rival companies with their own unlockables, (Sasquatch, and Ingot Roasting Co.)



The two unlockables for these companies are very interesting, one allows you to add gold to your drinks giving them that extra fancy look.



And the other shop unlocks a new service "Compostables" which increase the reputation produced by your customers.



This update also adds the option to sell companies you fully own. By selling the companies, you will recover the value from the stocks and the money in the bank. I also added a new filter to the companies' screen where you can see all companies, companies you have sold, or any company that you owned stocks and went bankrupt.



And finally, matcha is unlockable through the Creative Barista research.



This update also includes a fix for a bug where it was impossible to put wall decorations near the corner of some walls, and other minor bug fixes.

Getting to this point has been a fun and sometimes stressful ride but I am happy with the results and the feedback that I've gathered through the beta. The only thing remaining is to write a very long update announcement and check that there isn't any release blocking bug for the update. So, if everything goes smoothly expect that announcement and the V0.6 official release this Tuesday. Thank you for all your support and as always, enjoy your coffee.