Hello, everyone!
Hope you’re all beating the summer heat?☀️
As some of you might have noticed, our goal was to post a devlog on the 1st of every month.
The reason we’re a bit late this time, as posted on our news hub, is that we had to travel to Germany to participate in Gamescom and needed a little time to recover from jet lag...
What’s that? You’re asking if it takes a whole week to get over jet lag?
...Shall we then dive into the devlog for the month of August?
Since the demo release, thanks to so many of you playing the game and sharing your videos, we’ve been able to experience your vivid gameplay firsthand.
While watching the videos and listening to your thoughts, the development team realized that 'a lack of tutorials for cafe management' and 'high fatigue from repetitive cafe management tasks' are becoming major issues.
We tried addressing the tutorial issue by supplementing the lacking parts, but we felt that fixing the issue of management fatigue wouldn't be quite so easy.
If we were to reduce the number of regular customer interactions, the game's difficulty would spike, and if we were to adjust the time spent operating the cafe, the weight of the management portion would decrease—both of which would stray too far from our original design.
However, while playtesting the Week 3 management phase, the development team confirmed that the Part-Time Staff System unlocked at that point naturally solves this issue, and after much discussion, we decided to move this feature up to Week 1.
Because it's a feature that opens early on, to give it the power to carry through to the later stages of the game, it evolved from simply using predetermined part-time workers into a system where you contract and hire customers who visit your cafe.
Since this system was applied focusing only on basic functionality, there may still be many areas that need improvement.
If you haven't tried it yet, please experience it after the update and leave us plenty of feedback!
The first devlog topic turned out a bit too long and heavy.
This time, we'll bring you a slightly lighter story.
Since the game's art sticks to a style with thick outlines, we've continuously received reports regarding visibility and legibility issues, especially during dream battles.
We also tested various things for a long time, but it was too difficult to pick just a single setting among the many options.
So, we came up with the idea: why not create multiple choices and let you set it to the style you want? With that, we added a feature to change the art style mode in battle scenes.
This feature has also been added to the demo version in its basic state, and since there are still many elements like visual effects that aren't applied together with it, it is scheduled to be improved as soon as possible.
Please leave your thoughts on which mode you like best!👍
The content we are introducing this time hasn't been fully developed yet, but since many users have been sending common feedback and asking about it, we decided to introduce it in advance.
Among the various pieces of feedback, some mentioned that the combat system felt a bit too light.
This user experience wasn't caused by a lack of planning on our part, but was entirely intentional.
HIPS N NOSES is a game that combines two genres, but we've developed it with the goal of making the management simulation the main genre.
Accordingly, we designed the overall combat system to be lightweight so that everyone can enjoy it lightly and easily.
However, a system built for such a light and easy experience lacked depth, leading to a problem where the depth of experience you could get was also shallow.
We've spent a long time pondering how to improve this part, and fortunately, a great design was recently finalized and we are hard at work developing it.
To put it simply, just like how drinks have flavor tags in the cafe, we are attaching tags to weapons and skills, and if you hold a certain number or more of identical tags, you gain special effects.
Since it's still in development, there isn't much we can show you yet, but we will finish development as soon as possible and let you know through an update notice.
This news is somewhat removed from actual development.
We participated in Gamescom held in Germany from August 26th to 30th last month.
It was our first exhibition experience in the Indie Arena Booth area via BTC at Gamescom.
Even though it was a small booth, so many people stopped by and we were able to talk a lot about the game, making it a truly wonderful event.
Now that the official launch is not far off, we hope to participate in many more events moving forward and have opportunities to talk with you more!
That's all for this month's development news!
We were a bit sad about the lack of content in the last devlog, but this time the write-up got a bit long as we conveyed the development team's thoughts on our development direction.
We truly hope you enjoyed reading it, and we will leave you with a brief notice regarding our game show participation this month.
We will be participating in the Tokyo Game Show held in Tokyo from September 17th to 21st this month!
Detailed schedules and booth information will be announced once again through a future notice.
Additionally, there were quite a few instances where visitors to our booth had already played the demo at previous game shows.
For those individuals, we plan to provide an opportunity to experience gameplay corresponding to Week 2—the content right after the demo—at the offline events we attend prior to the official launch.
If you have already played the demo, please be sure to let our on-site development team know!🙌
This concludes the sixth HIPS N NOSES devlog.
Thank you for reading to the end.❤️
To stay updated with the latest news on HIPS N NOSES, please follow our official X and Discord channels.
Discord： https://discord.gg/34Xy3QDjNb
Twitter：@Pepper_Stones