Hello! It's a bit late, but happy new year! I hope the year has started off well! ːsteamhappyː
This month has been rather busy, with a lot of behind the scenes changes, but there are some new additions to the game as well. Let's go over them!
There's a new store in town!
As you progress through the game, you'll unlock the ability to turn your coffee into new drinks! You'll need to acquire recipes in order to make them, so there needs to be a place you can buy them from.
As you might guess, you can also buy gifts that you can give to others! These will be available in a weekly rotation, so you shouldn't have too much trouble buying them.
The book store won't be open for business at the start of the game, but once you have a need for some recipe books, you'll find that it's conveniently opened up..
You can now relax in the bathhouse, which is part of Lin Fei's Diner!
The bath is in the back of the diner, and is accessible whenever the diner is open. It's been in the game for a while, but you weren't able to get in the bath previously.
This month ended up being a bit more focused on QoL updates, since I got some professional feedback on things that could be improved. Not all of them will be obvious, but let's go over what you might notice!
It's been noted that interacting with objects and NPCs can be a bit clunky at times, especially when they overlap. I've added a little feature that highlights the object/NPC you can interact with, and improved the object detection.
I've also spaced out the position of machines on top of the bar, so that they don't overlap with customers.
The amount of time taken to grind and brew coffee has been shortened. The main adjustment was to grinding, which was probably too long with little interaction.
Given that you would eventually move to using an automatic grinder, as there's no benefit to doing it manually, I don't think there's a need to make manual grinding a tedious process, so it should be much quicker now!
I'll be adding an option to change the length of a day in-game. Currently a full day takes 24 minutes to get through, which can make the cafe shifts feel quite long. (A day shift can be up to 11 minutes uninterrupted)
I should be releasing an update to the demo next month, which will contain the changes made in the past few months. If you've played the demo before, you'll need to make a new save, as there's a lot of changes!
That's it for this update! Thanks for reading, and I hope you'll be here for the next one!
-Alex