Tavern Keeper 🍻 News

Happy 2024, future tavern keepers!

Steam Capitalism and Economy Fest has begun - a perfect event for management sims like our upcoming game Tavern Keeper - so let’s take this opportunity to share a bit about the money-making aspect and different styles of playing!



[h3]The basics of your tavern
[/h3]
Your tavern can offer a variety of food and drinks to cater to the preferences of the local patrons, and you, as the Tavern Keeper, can establish the prices for each item on the menu.

When you have a negative gold balance for more than a day in Tavern Keeper, it’s game over! But fear not, you’ll have some options to turn the tide – taking loans, selling furniture, increasing prices for services or (gasp!) firing your staff.

Please don’t fire staff, they get really really sad.


[h3]Challenge or Relaxing: Your choice!
[/h3]
Tavern Keeper has a bunch of difficulty settings you can tweak to your liking to make things as challenging or easy-breezy as you wish, from the tavern’s income to fire chance, and beyond. Plus, there are special achievements in some levels, like the challenge of finishing a scenario without ever taking a loan!
We’re all about giving you the freedom to play Tavern Keeper at your own pace - whether you’re in the mood for a more laid-back experience or crave a challenge. The game isn’t designed to fail you, so you can take your time and grow your tavern slowly but if you want to push yourself a bit, then it pays off to pay attention to details. Small issues might escalate over time and you could find yourself juggling a few unexpected disasters all at once!
Tavern Keeper is coming out Q3 this year - we can’t wait for you to play it!


[h3]Our first game is on sale!
[/h3]
Game Dev Tycoon is also taking part in the Steam Capitalism and Economy fest, with a 60% discount until January 15th! If you haven’t played it before, go check it out - and try to not go bankrupt. Unlike Tavern Keeper, Game Dev Tycoon is a little less forgiving!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/239820/Game_Dev_Tycoon/


Until next time,
The Greenheart Games Team 💚

Dear future tavern keepers!

Just wishing you Happy Holidays and a great start into 2024.

A festive holiday corner, created using Tavern Keeper's design mode.

We'll be back next year with private (Beta) tests, a public Steam demo and of course the launch(!) of Tavern Keeper 🍻 in Q3 2024.

See you next year,
The Greenheart Games Team 💚

Hey, future tavern keepers!

We’ve added a few new screenshots to our Steam page. Let’s take a look:

[h3]A whimsical tavern setting in the Halfling region[/h3]
Nestled beneath the high canopy of giant trees and surrounded by the green hills and rolling fields of Halflington, there will be a cozy tavern for you to manage.

The campaign in Tavern Keeper will see you open taverns in unique locations, each with their own environment, culture and interesting characters to meet. We've added this screenshot to show you one of these locations, the greenest!

[h3]The heart of any tavern: the taproom[/h3]

Our existing screenshots have shown taverns full of decorations and characters in the midst of a busy day but your tavern doesn’t start out like that. Often, you begin with an empty room and place furniture bit by bit.

The above screenshot shows the simple process of putting down a bar counter, the place where your patrons can order drinks. The green outline indicates that it is in a valid position and the little squares show you where your patrons will access or queue to use this small but crucial part of your tavern.

[h3]The staff hiring screen[/h3]
Tavern Keeper is a sim management game. It’s your tavern but you hire and manage staff members to do the grunt work for you. This is the staff hiring screen showing you different candidates, each with their own background, skill levels and personality traits for you to consider.

Until the next time,
The Greenheart Games 💚 Team

Hello, future tavern keepers!

Earlier this month - through some incredible last minute organization and a fair bit of luck - we managed to get a booth at the gaming convention “PAX Australia” and showcased, for the first time ever, a demo of Tavern Keeper to the public. We used this opportunity to road test a demo that we plan to improve for a private Steam test later, as well as for a public Steam demo a little further down the line (more on that later).

Above: A shot of our Tavern Keeper booth at PAX Australia - October 2023.

Imagine working for nine years on a game without ever really play-testing the game outside the small dev team (we can talk more about why in the future) and then heading to an expo floor to show a demo. Our PAX team of four flew in from four different countries: Austria, Brazil, New Zealand and Australia. For some of us it was the first time meeting each other! To say that we were nervous at PAX is an understatement. We were terrified but we were also excited as the demo was the first time that our full vision of the game was playable. We even managed to get professional (but still placeholder) voice acting implemented just days before the show!

[h3]How did it go?[/h3]
I’m happy to say that our first time showing Tavern Keeper was a phenomenal success! We truly didn’t expect to receive such overwhelmingly positive feedback from players. Players of all different backgrounds and age groups seemed to really enjoy the demo. We did observe several little pain points that we aim to improve on but none of them stood in the way of players finishing the demo and telling us that they were excited for more!

Above: Teaser build ready to go in 4K goodness!

[h3]Our favorite moments[/h3]
Our favorite moments were observing players enjoying all the little details and finding creative ways to play the teaser. Tavern Keeper is really three games in one so let’s look at the three core parts separately: the interactive storybook, the core management game and the decoration sandbox.

The story elicited audible laughs from players as well as incredulous gasps at the sass of the narrator: it was a huge boost of confidence to see players breeze through the narrated tutorial and storybook with such joy!

The management/sim part worked without a hitch and we observed what we were hoping for: players picked their own level of engagement with some players caring about every detail and managing every aspect while others making high-level decisions and sitting back to watch it all happen.

Above: The “Name your Tavern” screen. Some players read through all the fine print and we were not disappointed to see many creative tavern names!

The design mode was a hit and even though players only had little time to play with it, we saw so much creative potential and lots of players had fun placing oversized items around the place.

Above: How about placing a small teapot on a table? Why not a large one!

[h3]Limits were tested!
[/h3]Then of course there were some players that pushed things to the extreme. We had a toddler smash the keyboard as his father was playing and accidentally set off some development shortcuts - promising little hacker! We had one person click on the same plant dozens of times to see what the narrator would do! We had the obligatory naughty tavern names: one of which made it through our social media by accident 😆. We had “creative” furniture placements. We had someone test how big decorations can really go and nearly broke the UI in the process. A player found a creative way to bypass a limited selection of design items that we never even thought of! We had someone deleting every single furniture piece and kicking out the last customers before the demo was over… In summary: It was a lot of fun!

[h3]Meeting the players!
[/h3]Beyond the relief that our vision of the game worked and watching all the creative ways players engaged with the game, meeting the players was a definite highlight for us. Game development can be a very lonely endeavor - especially in an international-remote-working team where everyone works from home for a literal decade. We hardly even get to see our team, let alone our players.

It was truly a delight to chat with so many and on the off-chance you were there and are reading this: thank you for stopping by and connecting with us.

I know we will not have the chance to meet most of you but events like these are a great reminder that behind every Steam user, behind every Discord alias, and behind every developer account is a person. We are not taking any of you for granted!

Above: It's such a joy to see players engage with your game!
[h3]Onwards[/h3]
PAX Australia gave us a boost of energy, a renewed confidence about the game we’re making and how it (hopefully) resonates with lots of different people, from cozy gamers to fantasy and sim fans.

Our next goal is to bring a Tavern Keeper teaser to more players. We are currently improving the demo based on player observation and feedback and our aim is to start private Steam tests in the coming months with the larger goal of having a public demo in early 2024!

We’ll share more about how that will work and how to participate soon, so keep your eyes open for updates.

Until next time,
Patrick
(and the Greenheart Games 💚 Team)

This little baby of a Steam page is now a full 7 days old and the first week has been a true nail-biter for us.

An unexpected issue nearly prevented us from publishing the Steam page 😱 - thankfully that was sorted out within minutes with no damage. Then, sadly, the re-announcement didn’t go to plan and caused our reach to be drastically lower than what we'd been told to expect. Here is a rough analogy:

Imagine you are a band and are premiering your new album - you head to a party for 1000 people and get everything ready. You worked hard on this. You set up, you do the soundcheck, the doors open... and the first fifty people come in. Then, suddenly, the doors shut and remain closed with the rest of the crowd outside.

That's kind of what seemed to have happened... Game dev has its ups and downs and this was definitely a down!



We were truly heartbroken 💔. We’d worked so hard on the cinematic and Steam page (and of course the game itself) and we hoped that our re-announcement would reach a good initial chunk of our potential players. After the first day this did not seem very likely at all…

But then something amazing happened and YOU showed up. Against the odds, you have wishlisted the game an incredible 30K times in our first week! This absolutely exceeded our expectations! Wherever you came from: thanks so much for being here with us!



We are thrilled and grateful to get such a good start and look forward to the path towards release.

For us, the year ahead means building the community, finishing the game, preparing a Demo, and, of course, taking you along the ride (including the ups and downs) and showing you why Tavern Keeper 🍻 is so special to us!

If you are reading this, you are one of the early supporters and you have turned a challenging first week into something we can celebrate. Thank you so much for showing up!

To the path ahead,

Patrick
And the Greenheart Games 💚 Team