Hi everyone, and hello to everyone here from Steam's Next Fest. I hope you're finding lots of fun demos to play!
The past two weeks I've been very busy with life and setting up the PlateUp Next Fest demo and streams. I've also been working on some new features and some bug fixes for this week's update.
Stream
Briony and Kirsty will be streaming the game again live for the Steam festival this Wednesday from 2PM BST, so tune in to catch them then!
Demo
All the new features in today's update will also be added to the demo, and there's a couple of tweaks to improve the demo; in particular it should now be clearer that the demo only includes the Steak dish. To see the others, tune into one of the streams and watch as we cook fish, pies and salads!
Fish and seafood
The fish dish is currently quite easy; the idea is that you have lots of different possible fish to cook, but each day you get a random set of them, so you never quite know what you'll be dealing with. To improve this dish, I've added two new recipes; crab cakes and oysters.
Messes, fires and other accidents
This update adds the start of a new aspect of the game, which should help keep you on your toes as you run your restaurant. A new appliance, the Budget Hob has been added, which is very cheap, but comes with a few draw backs -- every time you use it you run the risk of starting a fire! Fire will spread across your kitchen (including across spilled grease), but you can put it out by interacting with it and it won't do any permanent damage!
I wanted to add some things that mix up the gameplay during the day, but I didn't want it to feel frustrating or like it was forcing you to deal with an artificial problem. I've tried to fix this by tying fire to a particular appliance - if you don't buy the Budget Hob, your kitchen won't catch fire. So if you're happy to keep things simple, you can avoid it entirely. I plan to add more things like this, but I'm going to try and make them feel quite "opt-in". I'd love to know what you think, so jump on Discord and let me know; do you want to run the riskiest kitchen in the business, or are you happy keeping things safe?
As part of this, messes (from customers and now from hobs) will start off small and stack up if you don't clean them up; it should be easier to keep on top of things if you keep things tidy, but will be much harder to sort out if you let things run away!
0.5 Patch Notes
This patch will be applied to the demo and the playtest, so everyone should see these changes
- Adds messy appliances: appliances can now cause mess when you use them. For now the sink will now splash water around, and the hobs will make grease that will slow you
- Added mess stacking
- Added oysters and crabs (part of Fish dish set)
- Adds large group unlock, allowing up to 6 customers at one table (they're comparatively patient, so you get lots of time to serve them)
- Adds fire(!)
- Adds new appliance Budget Hob (which may be related to fire)
- Fix bug with falling outside the restaurant and getting stuck (thanks Briony, Kirsty and basically everyone else!) - you should now be teleported back to the front door
- Allow players to place things over each other again (this was changed to fix the falling-out-the-world problem, placing appliances should be easier now)
- Fix bug with Informal Service (thanks JungleCat)
- Fix bug with restaurant being cut off at odd resolutions (particularly very tall ones)
- Fix problem with potato salads not being able to combine with sides (thanks Roxas)
- Fixes some bugs with recipes, so that plated tomatoes aren't smoking (thanks JungleCat for reporting)
- Balance tweaks to a number of dishes, including costs of steak cuts (thanks SummerBorne and Black_Knight43)
- Fix problems with the host stand, including customers queuing outside the map and bubbles getting stuck (thanks SummerBorne)