Planned Release Date: Feb 8, 2027

About This Game

Machikado Roastery (街角ロースタリー) is a cozy idle game that lives in a thin strip along the bottom of your screen. Work, browse, or play something else - your little roastery keeps brewing, and customers keep wandering in.

A coffee shop that stays out of your way

• Transparent, always-on-top window that sits above your taskbar

• Click straight through empty space to whatever's behind it

• Crisp pixel art at any resolution, on any monitor

• Quiet by default, light on your PC, and it never punishes you for looking away

Roast it yourself

Start with a hand-held te-ami over a flame and 50 grams of green beans. Listen for first crack, drop the roast, and work your way up to a drum roaster and beyond. Fresh roasts become pour-overs, lattes, iced coffee, and coffee jelly - then stock the display case so customers can grab what they want before they lose patience.

Tour Japan

Move your roastery anywhere, any time. Each place has its own street, its own landmark on the horizon, its own local sweets, and its own regulars.

• The old backstreets of Yanaka, Tokyo

• Kawaguchiko, at the foot of Mt. Fuji

• Nara Park, where the deer have opinions about your senbei

• Higashiyama, Kyoto, under evening lanterns

• Sapporo during the snow festival

• ...and more, across all four seasons

Build your crew

Hire staff for the counter, the roaster, the kitchen, and the barista bar. Everyone has a role, a personality, and room to grow - mentor your favorites, and teach them traits they've picked up from more experienced hires.

Grow your Fame

Unlock new menu items one at a time, pair each origin with the right sweets, and earn a name for yourself. Get written up in the paper, catch the attention of the local TV crew, and when a celebrity walks in craving the local specialty, make sure it's in the case.

Made to leave running

No timers that expire while you're away. No energy bars. No tapping to speed things up. Check in when you feel like it - your shop will be right where you left it.

From the developer

Hi, I'm Kyle! I was born and raised in Seattle, the city of coffee. While I was growing up, my aunt and uncle were building their bakery business, and eventually they started roasting their own coffee.

I've lived in Japan for 17 years now, and this year I decided it was time to bring my family's flavor across the Pacific. I've spent the year setting up my own roastery here in Gunma.

I'm a game developer who's gone deep into coffee, so making a game about it was the obvious next step. Everything in Machikado Roastery, from the crackle of the beans to the sweets in the case, comes from roasting, tasting and living it here in Japan.

AI Generated Content Disclosure

The developers describe how their game uses AI Generated Content like this:

Machikado Roastery is made by a solo developer (me) who uses AI tools as part of a small production. No content is generated live while you play.

Art: The pixel art is built from code rather than generated by image models. AI coding tools helped write the scripts that draw the sprites, and every piece is reviewed and adjusted by hand.

Writing: AI helped draft parts of the in-game text, character blurbs and store page, all checked and edited by me. The coffee knowledge and the Japanese settings come from my real experiences roasting coffee and living in Japan.

Translation: The Japanese text was drafted with AI assistance and checked by me and my wife, a native Japanese speaker.

Audio: Music and sound effects are a mix of paid assets, Python-scripted sounds, and some AI-generated pieces.