Tavern Keeper 🍻 News

We all love food, and patrons in Tavern Keeper love eating! For Steam Cooking Fest, we cooked up a new Inside the Tavern dev blog about how you can create different delicious meals to cater to your patrons' preferences. Let’s get to it:

[h3]Where the magic happens
[/h3]
Here’s the kitchen - you can already smell the lovely scent of… a warm rat skewer?! Eww!


In Tavern Keeper, the kitchen is one of the first new services you unlock after you earn your tavern’s first star. You start with a simple grill to prepare skewers, and as you keep earning more stars, new options become available, such as a soup pot, a bread oven, and more.

[h3]Swamp rats? Dragon Booger? Bog water!?
[/h3]
Of course, to cook you need ingredients! As the Tavern Keeper, you have a variety of meats, vegetables, and, erm… other things... you can buy to design your meals. Mix and match them in recipes to get different flavor profiles which can impact patron enjoyment.


As your tavern gets ever more prestigious, you have to buy better ingredients for your recipes. After all, you wouldn’t serve a Swamp Rat and Bog Water soup to a noblewoman, right?

[h3]The menu is yours
[/h3]
Build kitchen ✅
Buy ingredients ✅
Now let’s get to the recipes!


Different kinds of recipes become available as you expand and build out your kitchen. For example, once you place a soup pot you can make Morsel Soup, which needs a type of liquid (like water), a kind of morsel (choose from several types of meat or vegetarian alternatives), and can even include additional (optional) vegetables.



After crafting the recipe to fulfill your patrons’ desires, you just need to price it, and ta-da! Now you’re well on your way to your next tavern star.



Tavern Keeper has a demo available right now to get a taste of the game! While it doesn't feature the kitchen, you can learn the ropes so you're well prepared when the game comes out.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2833530/Tavern_Keeper__Demo/


In the meantime, here’s a little spoiler of a new animation we’ve been working on - what do you think this meal is made of? 👀



Until next time!
Patty, Social Media Manager @ Greenheart Games 💚

Hello there, my fellow music fans!

We’ve been working closely with the incredible team at Cedar Studios for all music and sound design in Tavern Keeper - you may know some of their work from other excellent games, such as Two Point Campus and Two Point Hospital!

As a part of Save & Sound 2024, a celebration of music and sound design in games, we’ve prepared the deepest of dives to share with you: a behind-the-scenes look at how Cedar Studios went about creating and implementing the dynamic music in the world map and how they set up the tavern chatter.

I could keep writing about it, or you could watch this deep dive we prepared!

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

If you ever wanted to get a real look at how the sound design magic is made, this video is for you, and with keen eyes and ears you might spot quite a few things we have never shown before. 👀

That’s it for today’s update! You can check all the love and detail the team at Cedar Studios has put into the game in our demo, which is available now!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2833530/Tavern_Keeper__Demo/

Wawaah! 👋
Patty, Social Media Manager @ Greenheart Games 💚

Happy spooky season, tavern keepers!

The Item Workshop level is BACK to the demo for Halloween and a NEW DESIGN CHALLENGE!

Some of you might be wondering: what is the Item Workshop?
The Item Workshop is a separate level in Tavern Keeper with no patrons, no management, and near unlimited gold to let your imagination go wild and create your own decorations and designs.



[h3]Create Spooktacular Designs[/h3]

Join the October Design Challenge and get a chance for your design to be added to Tavern Keeper!

The theme for this month comes with no surprise: it’s Halloween, time to get spooky! Create a standalone decoration inspired by Halloween using up to 300 gold. Design your own monster statue, make a creepy skull lantern, or bring your favorite real-life decorations into the game, it’s up to you.

Code for the skull lantern: TKC-0e14cb16

You can either participate by sharing your design on social media using the hashtag #TavernKeeperDesign, or posting it on our Discord’s #design-space forum with the “Challenge Oct2024” tag. Use as many design pieces as you’d like and submit as many entries as your imagination can conjure.

After November 8th, the Tavern Keeper dev team will handpick the top 5 designs, which will be added to the game for everyone else to see!


[h3]Sharing creations[/h3]

Here’s a quick tutorial on how to save your design and share it with other players!

First, right-click your design and pick “Save as Template”. Then, name it, set the category to “Decoration” and you’re all set!



Save and share the image with everyone! You can add other players' designs to your game by entering their code in the “Import” tool.


Cheers!
Patty, Social Media Manager @ Greenheart Games 💚

Sadly, we had to postpone our long-awaited Early Access Release. I know many here are really looking forward to the game so I wanted to take a moment to share a bit more about why we have come to this decision.

Perhaps surprisingly, given the announcement, the game at the moment is actually in a good state! All mechanics are implemented. It is content complete, has full English voice over and all translations should be ready within the week. The tutorial works great, the Early Access campaign (and stories) are fun and you’d likely have a great time playing it IF, and this is the crucial point, IF you know how to avoid a number of existing pitfalls.

Some staff can get stuck forever, some mechanics interact with each other in ways that make them hard to control, some UI elements and mechanics are a little too confusing. There are some performance issues and sometimes errors occur that interrupt or halt gameplay. In short: the likelihood that you would get frustrated while playing is currently a little too high for a great first experience.

The good news is that all these issues - given just a bit of time - are solvable, but if we had tried to stick to the November release plan, we’d likely have burned out the team in the process. You don’t want a burned-out team and you especially don’t want a burned-out team at the end of more than ten years of development and at the start of your Early Access journey. We’d also be launching into Early Access with a list of known issues that would keep us busy and prevent us from properly responding to your feedback in a timely fashion.

So, with heavy hearts but with clear minds, we have made the decision to postpone the release, giving us the breathing space to address the frustrations and to do things right.

We’ll announce a new release window next year, when we are ready.

When Tavern Keeper releases into Early Access, it will hopefully bring you joy, and both the game and the team will be ready for your input!

Patrick
And The Tavern Keeper Team