Last year, we delayed the Early Access release of Tavern Keeper. Why? There were just too many issues that could have made your first experience frustrating and, as a small team, we wouldn't have been able to fix them all while also supporting the launch properly at the same time.
We know many of you were looking forward to the release and the delay was disappointing. You've waited a long time for this, and we know that's not easy. This post isn't announcing a new release date yet (still targeting 2025), but we didn't want to leave you without news for so long. We want to tell you what we've been up to and show why the extra time has made a real difference.
Without our supporters, this game wouldn't exist. Not only because development was entirely funded by the unexpected success of Game Dev Tycoon, but the excitement you've shown for Tavern Keeper has kept us going. We just want to say: We don't take you for granted.
Our primary goal is to deliver a delightful game to you - one that respects your time and intelligence. Thank you for hanging in there with us a bit longer and for those of you who enjoy a bit of a dev-log, here's a behind-the-scenes look at what we've been working on and what our next plans are.
🐛 Bugs, bugs and more bugs
We fixed hundreds of high-priority bugs, then found hundreds more and fixed those too. Many of these bugs could have caused significant player frustration (or confusion) and some even led to game-breaking states (obviously a no-no 🚫). Of course, there was also a fair share of amusing bugs, such as tavern guests getting stuck on toilets with no energy (how relatable), staff serving customers drinks who are already in bed (dedicated... but creepy) and characters spinning wildly around in circles (the game is many things but a racing game isn't one of them).
Then, there is this horrifying visual glitch that causes our cozy characters to become the stuff of nightmares - Who knew we have things in common with AC: Unity...
Avert your eyes - We are still not sure what causes this one 😕
There were some more embarrassing bugs like no random stories triggering at all in scenarios (oops!) and several very hard-to-find issues, like a soup pot that would malfunction but only if the staff interacting with it showed an overhead icon 😵💫.
We could go on... but what's important is that we took the time to fix hundreds of problems and the game is now much more stable.
Of course, a game with such complexity will always have some issues but ideally they would be minor nuisances, perhaps even amusing and not frustrating or worse, game-breaking.
🌟 Game Feel
Fixing bugs is important but equally important is making sure the game feels right. We have made dozens of adjustments, small and large, to that effect. This ranged from tiny changes like making some traits more likely, adding particle effects to highlight UI parts better, or changing the sound effects on some frequent sounds to be more subtle. We made some larger changes too, such as adjusting food recipes and ingredients and overhauling when and which guests spawn to come to your tavern. We also adjusted how fast your staff can walk (they are faster now) and how long a full day is (it's a little longer now).
😕 Solving Experience Issues
While testing the game, we observed a common frustration where players didn't quite have enough information to make sense of what was going on in the cozy-chaotic world of Tavern Keeper. The game already had a ton of features showing players what is happening - from alert badges, to narrator/advisor comments, to more drastic visual and audio effects - but even with all that, sometimes events were too easy to miss - and there was no way to look at a history of events.
To solve this we added a new feature: The Tavern Log.
The tavern log simply shows game events as little scrolls under the timeline (up to three at a time) and allows you to access a diary of such events so you can investigate what happened in your tavern. This was loosely inspired by combat logs in RPGs.
Here it is in action:
Gone are the moments where players would sit baffled, wondering why a staffer is no longer there (they quit in frustration), or where all the bread has gone (it turned to dust), or why the coffers are suddenly not quite so empty anymore (a generous patron gave an unexpected tip).
The tavern log is the kind of feature you don't notice is badly missing until you add it. On paper it sounds trivial, just a low-priority nice-to-have, but in reality it's a crucial feature that makes your first-play experience so much smoother. We're glad it made it into the Early Access release!
📜 Game Content
Over the past months, we have continued to work on game content originally planned for our post-Early Access road map. Most of this has not meaningfully delayed the release further, it's just a side-effect of how we work most effectively as a team as not everyone can fix bugs all the time.
We have added more random stories, narrator/advisor content as well as additional game scenario polish. We added more animations and graphical assets including decorations and a set of new skeleton models. There's more sound design, voice overs, a new level-complete screen and even some new mechanics and environmental effects.
Above: A new environmental effect 'flying embers' which temporarily increases fire risks - watch out!
☀️ More Early Access Content
Tavern Keeper is built around a narrative campaign that takes you on a journey across six distinct locations. From the muddy swamp, across the unique lands of the halflings, orcs, dwarves and elves, all the way to the capital city. Each level feels and plays differently, has its own story, introduces new mechanics and level-specific challenges. Each level also comes with variations for a fresh feel in freeplay.
Over the past decade, we have implemented all the core mechanics, stories, and scenarios but the earlier levels (and systems) are far more polished than the later ones. A big reason why we are going into Early Access is to get feedback and observe different playstyles on these polished levels, before finalizing and releasing the late-game content for v1.0.
Our original plan for Early Access last year would have shipped two of the six total scenarios on day one with the third (the orc level) planned as the first major content update on the roadmap. Each scenario offers many hours of content but we were worried that this just would not be enough content for those who really wanted to dig in.
We therefore decided to change the plan to include the third level as well. This did cause a lot more work on our end but now you will just get more content from the get-go. Ignoring freeplay and design mode, the three scenarios alone should give you around 25 hours of highly polished content, more if you take your time.
💚 Quality of Life
As part of our bug-fixing spree, we also managed to implement several Quality of Life and other smaller features. These are features that just make the game smoother to play. Here are some examples:
- Improved tooltips and handbook content with better formatting.
- Loading screen tips now teach some of the less-obvious features.
- Ingredients and meal tooltips provide much clearer information.
- Ability to reset the schedule of rooms and staff back to default.
- Staff schedule now visually indicates if staff would be overworked.
- Patrons and staff can be renamed.
- Selected staff are now highlighted more clearly.
- If performance drops, we show you clues on possible causes.
- Skipping the cinematic now prompts whether to auto-skip it in future.
- Drink selection on taps now clearly shows what's selected on other taps.
- Icon and button contrast has been improved throughout.
- A new alert badge warning you if a room doesn't have any doors.
- More ways to manually direct staff to do certain jobs.
- Various UI interactions have been made more intuitive.
- Discord and Steam rich presence are now supported.
- Staff behaviour around storing goods is now considerably smarter.
- And many more!
🚀 Performance
We were worried about game performance and made huge improvements to many parts of the game these past months. The game runs a lot better now. We will post some minimum and recommended specs closer to release but we have been able to reduce requirements significantly. You will still need a machine better than a potato 🥔 but overall the game runs better now across a variety of devices.
🎨 Design Mode Performance
When we started to talk about Design Mode and launched our Creator Club last year, we held a few design competitions with the community. The results were truly awe-inspiring. We were absolutely blown away by what players have made using Design Mode.
The DnD table was one of the first designs ever made and with a whopping 640 pieces shows that there are few limits to what players could create.
Above: The amazing DnD table by Aleaty where every piece is hand-placed and adjustable. The little cards on the table? Those are scaled-down carpets - brilliant!
But that's just one example, see here for a list of the winners of our three competitions thus far.
It's evident that Tavern Keeper's Design Mode is incredibly powerful for beginners and advanced creators alike. We hope that, come release time, the community will go NUTS with this, create and share designs and enable cozy taverns like no one has ever seen before 🤞
It is our job to enable this and, to that end, we've implemented significant performance improvements when building complex designs and when placing hundreds of decorative pieces in the tavern.
We've also developed the foundation for future improvements. One of the features we'd like to put on the Early Access roadmap is a colour picker that would allow you to customize the colours of any piece, not just select from a fixed selection of styles. With recent changes this is a lot more feasible now.
⚠️ Some things didn't go so well
The past months were largely successful. We fixed issues at a good pace, even though we found more problems than expected. What didn't go so well was upgrading to the latest Unity engine version. We underestimated just how many things would break and spent significantly more time than anticipated fixing everything. This wasn't really anyone's fault. Unity itself was relatively painless to upgrade but our game is complex and several techniques (as well as assets) we used in the past caused cascading issues that caused a lot of things to break completely. It was really rough for a bit but the good news is that upgrading did give us a little better performance and a couple of other useful features and at least we don't have to go through this mess during Early Access.
✂️ Some things we have cut (for now)
It was secretly our hope that we'd have time to add controller support from day one but that is sadly off the cards for now. To give a bit of background: Adding controller support is more than just adding control-mappings, it requires adjusting all of our custom 3D UI to work with controllers, a big undertaking. We'll re-assess after the Early Access release and see what the demand is.
🛣️ What's next?
We hope this goes some way to show you how far we've come. We are nearing the end of pre–Early Access development; nearly all the big tasks are done and we're getting ever-closer! But there's still a little bit more to do: We are currently updating translations, some important issues remain, and the 'freeplay' experience needs just a little more attention.
Please know that we are just as keen as you to get the game into your hands but ultimately, we need to do right by you. Whether you are here for the management sim mechanics, the story moments, the creative decoration elements - or ideally a mix of all of these - we want your first experience with Tavern Keeper to be a delight - even in Early Access.
Thank you for hanging in there with us a little longer and thank you so much for your support, patience and encouragement.
It keeps us going 💚
Patrick
And The Tavern Keeper Team
PS:
If you haven't tried the Tavern Keeper DEMO yet, we've just put it back online (though it does not contain the aforementioned improvements).
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2833530/Tavern_Keeper__Demo/