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Hi again dear cat enthusiast!
It’s been a bit, hasn’t it? It's cause we've been real hard at work on Cat Cafe Manager and we've got some big exciting developments to talk about!
Shifting Shifts!
The biggest change we’ve recently made has been to the game’s Shifts.
Back when we released the teaser trailer the game had 2 clear phases: the ‘management’, and 'shift' phase. You made big management choices in the paused management phase and ran your cafe by ordering staff in the real-time shift phase.
While this sounded great on paper, it turned out this caused the game to be nowhere as chill and relaxing as we’d liked. To keep the shift interesting, we either had to tune it so you were constantly doing something (not very chill OR relaxing!), or have you wait around staring at your cafe going about its merry business before you could make management decisions again.
Ha ha just playing my relaxing cat game ha ha *sweating profusely*
We decided to scrap those two phases and, much like the ill-considered bacon-and-cereal breakfast, just smash the two together! And just like that seemingly appalling meal, the results were unexpectedly delicious…
If you start up the dev build of Cat Cafe Manager now, the game’s clock is always ticking (unless you decide to pause it) and you can make ‘management’ decisions (expanding your cafe, changing up the menu) and 'shift' decisions (directing a poor soul to go mop up that cat wee in the corner) at any time you'd like.
While the cafe is open, pop into Build Mode to pop down a fridge
This might seem like a pretty small change, but it had a huge impact! It removed a lot of waiting from the game (you no longer have to wait for the Shift to end to go buy that new scratching post you were eyeing) and results in a much more organic and relaxed pace.
You can go make big important management decisions while your staff is serving your customers, although you might have to hop in and directly order them around when things get hairy!
Cat Adoption!
We’ve been working on so much more stuff, though!
First up: Rick (who refers to himself in the third person?) finished up the Cat Adoption mechanic, ready to be polished up at a later time.
Buy cat food from Carla-Lalla’s pet emporium and place it outside your cafe to attract stray cats. Different cat food attracts different cats. To adopt the truly strange mythical cats which roam the woods around Caterwaul, you’ll have to get pretty creative with your food choices!
When a stray pops by and eat the food, they’ll gain a little bit of Trust. You can also send one of your staff (preferably that cat-whisperer with the really high ‘Cat Care’ skill!) to go pet and befriend the stray, gaining a big Trust boost.
Hello cool stray cat! Bye, cool stray cat! (Work in Progress, unpolished gameplay)
Once a cat's Trust bar is full, they decide to come hang out at the cafe, and you get to adopt and name them! Some cats are tougher to adopt than others, and will require many visits and their favorite food to win their trust.
Assigning Staff!
Rutger worked hard on the staff assignment UI.
Click on a staff member, or their icon in your HUD, to go into their Assignment Mode. This will highlight the different tasks that need doing: from cleaning a toilet to calming down a cat with zoomies. Simply click the task and they’ll go do it!
Each staff has different skill ratings, so better make sure to hire staff for all the different tasks in your cafe.
Someone's got to do it, right?
Oh, and your staff can do tasks all on their own if you can buy a nice hat! Different hats correspond to different activities, so a chef hat will cause a staff member to cook up a storm without having to manually tell them to do so!
Bring in the Cats!
Carmen’s also been hard at work making more cute cats and cat animations!
I’ll just let them speak for themselves.
Much more!?
Turns out writing a dev diary after a two-month break is really hard because we’ve just made so much stuff in the meantime! A lot of it is still in progress, like Rutger’s rad new lighting system, Rick’s improvements to the game’s mailbox and shops or Carmen’s new town map and beautiful cat shrine.
I guess we’ll show them off another day...
OK Fine Calm Down here's a GIF and a screenshot
Work in progress, mind!
The shrine is almost ready for you to renovate!
For now, I hope you'll continue to look forward to Cat Cafe Manager!
Thanks for reading!
Roost Games’ Rick