This week we are going to discuss how we designed our bakery in Senpie. We wanted players to feel like they are peering "beyond the veil" into another world. We also wanted to capture the shopkeeping gameplay through interaction rather than menus.
When we first started thinking about what a "spirit bakery" could look like, we were influenced by an episode of Natsume's Book of Friends. In it Natsume interacts with a tiny deity and the shrine it calls home.
We made the exterior of the bakery a shinto shrine, adding Shimenawa over the open doors, and a Jizō Statue and stone lantern to decorate the exterior part of the shrine that's "in our world." The statue and lantern are also meant to add a sense of scale, miniaturizing the bake shop and making the shrine feel like a window into another world.
Since Granny is running a bake shop, we added customers that queue up outside. Most are pulled from yokai lore, but if you look closely, you might find a few homages to some of our favorite shows. A Kappa, Tanuki, Dōmokōmo and Jinja hime are some of the friends you make as you complete orders. The crowd is also part of the shopkeeping gameplay, indicating the bakery's popularity. The more orders you complete, the bigger the crowd, but if you fail to deliver orders on time they start to leave!
Customers can't place orders if they don't have a way to call the shop! So we had to give Granny a cute little vintage Japanese phone. The phone isn't just flexing aesthetics - customers will call to complain if you failed to deliver their order!
And while she might have a vintage aesthetic, Granny still needs a top of the line point-of-sale computer. It's actually a mini interface simulator for managing orders, purchasing items and supplies, tracking resources, controlling settings, or accessing customer support to revisit the tutorial.
There's also a shrine (shrine within a shrine?!) that Granny can use if she's low on karma. We wanted to create a tradeoff and since customer orders have a due date (day of the week), meditating at the shrine costs a day to complete. We even created a little time of day cycle for it!
Lastly, there's the gachapon machine. We were lucky enough to visit Japan a few years back and got a little addicted to the cute things you win in them, so we wanted replicate that feeling in game! Just like in real life, they're a big money sink, but in Senpie they also make Granny the most fashionable baker in the spirit world!
And that does it for this week's Behind the Bakery. Tune in next week where we look at some of the secrets and easter eggs you may find in Senpie!