Hello there, coffee lovers!
We hope your autumn (or your spring!) it's been off to a great start. After a well-deserved vacation, we’re back to game dev with our batteries fully charged. In fact, it's been a few weeks since that but we decided to delay the new post until we could show you a preview of the next update. And, for your joy, it's happening today!
Today we’re focusing on two aspects of the upcoming patch that you’ll find most interesting — the fan base system and the customer info dashboard! But first, let’s quickly remind ourselves of the rest of the changes this Autumn update will bring.
- Important notifications such as the status of coffee or the lack of demanded services will appear above customers’ heads.
- Customer thoughts will turn into review tags that can be aggregated for a summary.
- Side tables with sweetener dispensers will be functional.
- The number of marketing campaigns you can active simultaneously will be limited.
- You will be able to rename your shop staff.
The first two points concern the customer information panel, so we'll start by breaking down this feature.
Keeping your consumers happy is vital for your business to attract new coffee fans over time. We are not talking about individual opinions, such as those that can already be read by clicking on each character, but about how this group of people who frequent your store perceives your products and services. To display this information simply, we have created an information dashboard that looks like this:
The more customers rate positively your drinks, your food, and what you offer to make their stay comfortable, the higher your average happiness rate will be. You will get an idea just by looking at the thinking clouds popping over clients' heads. As for the last review received, there’s not much new: the reviewer's opinion is worth the same as that of any other customer, but it creates positive or negative trends that increase or reduce the number of customers you have for a limited time.
Clients won’t show a preference regarding the bean variety or its roasting level — but they take quality very seriously, so you better start training your roasting skills and unlocking new machinery because some of them will expect you to serve coffee with a score higher than 80 or 85 points. If you constantly forget about satisfying that expectation, they’ll finally manifest a negative opinion of your shop and refuse to become your fans.
All this brings us to the new progress system we’re about to introduce. It’s planned to replace the current scale of 11 levels where reaching each of them unlocks a new feature or machine, so once you get to the last one there’s a crescent sensation of having reached the top of the game. The fan base system breaks with it since the number of brand adepts will constantly increase depending on your decisions and management style.
We will keep the aspect of unlocking new items as you achieve a certain amount of followers, but all the rest is entirely new. Every time a customer orders a coffee or a bun, the game evaluates different aspects of the products and services you offer. If the result meets the client's expectations, this person will become part of your fan base.
One more thing you have to bear in mind is that being popular doesn’t mean business growth is going to be quicker — the bigger your community is, the harder it will be to unlock new traits and machinery. We’d love to make it clear with another screenshot, but the IU for this feature is still in development and there’s not too much to see now. We will reveal it as soon as possible in a new post.
That’s all for today, dear coffee addicts! We are counting the days until you can enjoy this new content. This is the final stretch of Coffee Shop Tycoon’s development, which is planned to be fully released in December 2022, and we need more than ever that you help us to make it known. If you have friends who love management games and are curious about the world of coffee, please recommend them to try ours!
Have a great weekend,
The Riff Studios team