Update cycle
I will be experimenting with different update schedules. There is unfortunately only so much I can get done in a week, and I feel that the weekly update schedule is starting to get a bit counter productive. Releasing an exciting update and doing what’s best for the game are different and sometimes conflicting goals, and not every change fits neatly inside a weekly update. This week's update is also very small mainly because I spend the most part of the week working on a feature that I can’t reveal yet. I’m not exactly sure what the new update schedule will look like yet and will release one more weekly update next week. After that I will probably move to bi-weekly updates. I’m planning to increase the time between updates as the game approaches full release in order to make bigger updates.
Menu rework
I changed the menu unlock system a few months back and have never really been happy with it. In a lot of my tests people did not really get the idea that the payment for research was spread out over multiple months. After a lot of deliberation, I think that replacing the research cost with a simple single payment is a better system. The monthly payments did not provide enough gameplay value to justify the confusion they caused.
I also reworked the menu window slightly to make it a bit more intuitive to see the dish unlock requirements.
Casino games
This will probably be a bit of a controversial change, but I decided to cut the roulette, poker, blackjack and money wheel games for the game. My reasoning behind this is that TasteMaker at its core is a game in which you build and manage your own restaurant. The casino games did not really contribute to this and I feel that adding them might have been a mistake. I personally think that these games were not very interesting from a gameplay perspective, and therefore still needed a lot of work to polish. But as I mentioned earlier in this blog, my time and resources are limited. So I felt that cutting these casino games and investing the time that this saves into the core of the game, is the right thing to do. I’m very interested in your opinion on this change as I do realize that it might be a bit controversial.