Hello everyone! I hope you are enjoying the beginning of Fall and for those with cold weather, the additional reasons for having a hot cup of coffee. The last months have been busy and full of work; I took a coffee tasting and roasting course to help design the Roasting feature while working on improving the employee system to support it. At this point I have a very good idea of what roasting is going to look like and just need to work out some details while implementing it. The artist should start working shortly on the roasters, and I’m also happy to announce that a new developer is joining the team to help bring Coffee Shop Tycoon to 1.0 and out of early access.
For v0.7.0 the focus was on improving the employee system in the game, adding original music, and finally adding a Help manual in-game, there was also a lot of work around polishing existing screens and fixing existing bugs.
Employee roles
Employees haven’t been very specialized in the past, while you could recruit someone with better barista skills, in the end the total impact was just a sum of the barista skill for every active employee. So, you could have an employee that was great all around and there was no reason to have one skill prioritized over another. With the addition of roles, now not all skills are relevant, starting on v0.7.0 now employees need to have assigned roles, you can choose a Cashier role or a Barista role, these roles can be exchanged any time but only the highlighted skill is active. You can also assign both roles to one employee when starting out but the performance of each skill will be decreased.
Skill progression was updated to consider roles, now, an employee skill won’t improve automatically if it is not in use by the current role, for example, a Barista will end up with a low Service skill over time unless that skill is specifically trained.
To support this feature, a new employee screen was added, from here you can assign, unassign, fire, specialize, train, update roles, adjust salaries, and check all current stats and active boosts. You can access this new screen by clicking on the employee or through the bottom employee menu.
The roles of employees are removed when they are unassigned, only active employees will have roles assigned to them.
Inspiration moments
Another new feature for employees is “Inspiration moments”, previously, the only boost that employees could have was through the salary, now, depending on the role that your employee is currently performing a random inspiration moment can occur. Inspiration moments are more common for higher level employees and will have better perks. These are some examples of the type of boosts your employee can get:
- Coffee is brewed X% faster
- Instantly brews next X coffee batches
- Reviewer scores higher
- Customer X% more likely to order twice
Original Music
I am also happy to announce that Coffee Shop Tycoon now has original music! I had the opportunity to work with the talented Chris A. Yenney on four new songs for the game including a new title screen song. I hope you enjoy listening to them while building your coffee empire as much as I did. You can follow Chris on twitter @chrisayenney or visit him at https://chrisayenney.com/ to check out other projects.
Help Section
This has been a top request and something I’ve been wanting to add for a long time. Tycoons can sometimes be overwhelming, there are usually many systems in place and it can become frustrating trying to understand everything from small tutorials that can’t be replayed, for that reason I am adding a dedicated help section in-game that you can check any time. New topics will also be unlocked while making progress in the game to keep the current help sections relevant to your progression.
UI Polish
Through the development of Coffee Shop Tycoon, I’ve been evolving the UI design, however some screens hadn’t caught up, for that reason, I spent some time going through all the screens in the game and updating them to match the latest design, also did some tweaks to that design to have a more pleasant aesthetic. I hope you enjoy controlling your coffee shop from these improved screens. There is still some work around making all scrollbars look the same but in my opinion that is at least less distracting than a different color scheme and title placement.
Tweaks to Beans, Food, and Ingredients quality
I tweaked the quality of coffee beans, food, and ingredient crates to have a higher impact on the customer happiness and reputation, as a side effect, all current supplies in your shop will show 1 star even if they were higher quality. New orders will show the correct star rating.
Bug Fixes and Misc
Finally, this update also includes bug fixes, and some minor changes:
- Fixed collision on three chairs (Chea, Isu, Anrakuisu) that prevented customer from reaching the chair.
- Specializations are now disabled when unassigning or transferring the employee.
- Fixed horizontal scroll in employee bottom screen.
- Fixed cashier collision on “Fancy Station”
- Fixed employee slot on “Japanese Station”
- Fixed Japan décor ratings
- UI bugs
- Added confirmation dialog when exiting hiring screen after interviews.
- Now there is no limit when hiring employees.
Next Update
As some of you know, next update is all about Roasting and a new location. Art work should start this weekend, design is almost done and development has already started. I will be posting some development updates along the way to share some of the exciting features coming to the game. Thanks for reading this far and enjoy your coffee.
Follow me at @riffstudios on twitter for more updates.