Coffee Shop Tycoon News

Hello everyone, we are back with another development update for the Roasting update, we have made good progress since the last update, focusing on polishing the roasting mechanics, creating the roasting challenge system, and finishing the 3D models for the location.


The roasting mechanics are ready! We still have to tweak some numbers and finish adding animation, sounds, and UI, but for the most part, the ability to roast beans and sell them in your store is already working. First, you start by selecting a bean, picking an employee from any of your stores, and finally starting the roasting process. Here you tweak the heat levels to achieve the desired tasting notes, discovered notes will be visible as long as the coffee bean is in the market, you are ready to finish your roast once all notes have been revealed and the bean is no longer underdeveloped.
In the result screen, you are able to see how well your roast went and get a final score for your roast profile. The skill of your employees along with the bean variety and coffee notes determine your final score. Only employees with the same roasting skill or higher will be able to roast these beans, so having one rock star is not enough to sell this coffee at all your locations.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
*UI in development

Back at your store, clicking on a roaster with an assigned employee will allow you to roast those beans, once roasted, they will appear in your supplies as any other bean. Existing beans have been modified to include the same stats as roasted beans (score, notes, roast).

*UI in development

Depending on your reputation, customers will expect higher scored beans, and just like décor rating, specific coffee gradings will now be required to achieve bronze, silver, and gold ratings in your store.
That’s not all, we are also introducing the concept of roasting challenges!


To become the best roaster and sell the best coffee you will have to prove you are one with the coffee bean, so to inspire you to become a coffee master we are adding Roasting Challenges!
When you start roasting, you won’t have access to all the coffee beans in the world, coffee beans are unlocked by regions and varieties.
Regions can be unlocked by completing specific roasting challenges, each region has a different set of possible coffee notes, some have Fruity coffee, some others Nutty or Sweet notes, and not only that! Coffee Beans can also be unlocked by varieties. Varieties have different quality levels and are unlocked with roasting points that are collected by completing roasting challenges. As you progress in your roasting adventure you will unlock higher quality varieties and more exclusive coffee to sell in your store.
Roasting challenges will also unlock unique machines including Espressos, Brewers, Roasters, and a new Grinder. We hope you have fun completing these challenges and learn how to roast the most incredible virtual cup of coffee.


We have a name for the new location, and it is “Emerald City”! This is the nickname of the city of Seattle, where most of the development of Coffee Shop Tycoon has taken place, this is also a city where our dreams as game developers started becoming a reality, so we couldn’t find a more fitting name for the location.
As you can see from the pictures below, the new location is almost ready! This is the largest location in the game so far, and we have had a lot of fun planning and designing the space, we hope you also have a lot of fun playing in it.



Emerald City is a big space where you can feature your new Roaster and large working station, it also has an alley which can be bought as an extension to your shop. Once bought, the alley will be converted into a magic place where coffee and city merge into a single experience.
At this point, the only thing remaining is to add the location's missions, and some traffic to make the environment feel like a living place.
We have also started configuring the new items, all models and textures are ready but we are still configuring them to work with the game since we have prioritized finishing up the roasting mechanics instead.


We are very close to having all the main systems working, we are currently focusing on finishing the remaining UI, animations, sound, missions, bean bag customization, and other final details before we can give a definitive release window. Considering the size of the update we will publish it first as an open beta, we hope to give you a date for the beta next month and show you more finalized screens and videos of all the work we are doing. Thank you for all your patience and for supporting the game, we are truly doing everything we can to bring this to you as soon as possible but we are still a small team and the coffee intake is already pretty high :D

You can follow us on Twitter @RiffStudios for more updates. See you soon on the next update and thanks for reading this far, as always enjoy your coffee! And stay safe.

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, 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.

Hello! I hope you are having a great week, here on Puget Sound we are preparing to be covered in snow soon, so stocking those coffee beans to get us through the week. As some of you might have noticed there was a small update pushed last week, this update fixes a game breaking bug that prevented you from closing the Employee information screen if the screen was open during the Du Latte Awards. We validated other screens and it seems that only this screen had the problem, it looks like there was a glitch with the unity controls that made the close button fly away from the screen when it disabled and re-enabled. Other than that fix there isn’t much else on the update, we have been focused on the Roasting update so we have everyone working on getting this update to you as soon as possible.
Speaking of roasting we have some cool new working screens to show you the progress and talk about the new mechanics.


First, we are introducing a new skill for your employees “Roaster”. This skill works similarly to the other existing skills, your employee will level up the skill through roasting or by taking some of the new trainings. You are also able to find employees that are specialized in roasting. Employees on existing saves will also have this skill, so you will be able to start roasting right away.



Roasting can be done in the HQ and your coffee shop, the first step is to go to your HQ, here you will find a new Roasting area where you can browse green beans from several origins and different properties, we are actually working right now on the system that generates all this beans. From there, you can pick a type of bean and start making a new “Roast Profile”. You will need to pick someone from your existing employees to do this, their roasting skill will be important to achieve a higher score for your roast. During roasting you will come across several flavor and aroma notes that are present in the bean, depending on the temperature you use for your roast you can try to get different notes. Once you have discovered these notes on that specific bean you can try to get other notes.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

The selected bean, achieved notes, and the employee skill level will define the final score for your coffee beans. These scores will be important to your customer, a higher reputation store will require better coffee beans in order to progress. Bronze, silver, and gold bean ratings will be updated to take into consideration specialty coffee and custom beans.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Back in the store, any employee with enough skill level will be able to roast the “Roast Profile” you just created from the HQ while there are enough supplies of the specific green bean. Green beans will change over time.

We are also working on system to customize bean bags so you can add your own style to your new roasted beans, we will share more details on another dev update.

Finally, we are going to leave you with some new renders from our talented artist, thanks for reading so far and enjoy your coffee.

Hello everyone! I hope some of you are ready to take a deserved vacation and enjoy the holidays even if it is just a dinner with your household or an online family dinner like I plan to do. The last couple of months have been interesting, we have been working on the new update while still working on localization and bug fixes, I wanted to give you an update on the things we are doing for the next update and delight you with some new renders.

The next update is all about allowing you to create the ultimate coffee company, which means that you will have a new location and new options for your company, mainly roasting and selling your own coffee! The new location is inspired by top reserve coffee shops that showcase the amazing world of coffee, it has a modern/industrial vibe and it comes with a lot of new store items and equipment. We don’t have a render for the location ready yet but we certainly have a lot of renders for the new items and equipment!



As you can see we have been working hard to bring you more content and expand the world of Coffee Shop Tycoon. These are some of the new items coming to the game but there are still more to come with this update.

Now back to Roasting, we have been thinking about adding roasting for a while now, but it is certainly not something we want to add lightly, it has to tie in with the game mechanics and progression on the game, for the past 6 months or so there has been a lot of investigation and design to come up with a Roasting system that would be fun and work with the game.

Roasting is going to work similar to the drink creation but it has its unique mechanics, it all starts by having a new skill for your employees, just like the Barista, Speed, and Service skill, now there is a Roaster skill, you will be able to train this skill, level it up while roasting or recruit employees that focus on this skill. Once the Roasting station is unlocked in the HQ you will be able to go in there and create a new "Roasting Profile". This screen will show you the green beans currently in the market with their origin and attributes, you will be able to grab these beans and start roasting a new batch which will become a new "Roasting Profile".

Work in Progress

This is a manual process where you control the Roaster by increasing and lowering the heat to extract different notes and flavors from the coffee. If you successfully manage to create a new batch without burning the coffee, a group of coffee tasters will grade your coffee. You will then be able to select the branding of your beans and save your "Roasting Profile". Back in the store, you will be able to place roasters in your shop and hire employees to roast these roasting profiles while those green beans are still available. Finally, your roasted coffee will show up in your coffee supply and you will be able to use it as any other bean.

To make this more fun we will be also tweaking the way store reputation works to take into consideration special beans, customers expectations and stats will also be tweaked to work with the roasted beans.

To sum it up, the next update will have a new feature "Roasting", a new location, and new items. This location will have missions that will be only completed by Roasting new delicious beans but we will see how Roasting can be introduced earlier in the game probably during the 4th location.

We will keep updating you with new screens and renders as we keep working on this update, and we'll let you know as soon as there is a beta available to try all these things out! Thanks for reading, happy holidays, and enjoy your coffee!

Follow us on Twitter @RiffStudios
Join the conversation on Discord Riff Studios Discord

Hello everyone! I have exciting news today, Coffee Shop Tycoon now has Steam Cloud! Sync your game progress between any PC and Mac. Custom drinks and logos also sync so you can continue managing your Shop anywhere you go.

In order to support Cloud Saves, we needed to make some changes on how the previews of custom drinks and logos are saved, Windows users are not impacted by this but if you are a Mac player you will need to do one small step to recover your custom drink previews.


If you are playing on a Mac you will notice that your custom drinks' preview on an existing save is missing, to fix this you will need to move some files.

1. Go to this folder on finder "~/Library/Application Support/Riff Studios"
   
2. Copy every drink preview you see into the "Coffee Shop Tycoon" folder and rename each file to remove "Coffee Shop Tycoon\\" from the name
   

Sorry for the problems in Mac but we hope you find Cloud Saves a good addition to the game, thank you for all your support and enjoy your coffee.

Follow us on Twitter @RiffStudios
Join the conversation on Discord Riff Studios Discord