Hello everyone! Pumpkins are out, and ghosts are starting to haunt our office, but we have tried to ignore them, throw coffee at them and pretend that there is not a psycho killer behind us, everything we can to keep making steady progress! And we are back with another dev diaries. This is the last update before we release the beta next Friday! Yeah! You heard it. We have finally completed the features necessary for the beta! We are currently playing the update and fixing any lingering bugs while tweaking the challenges and rewards. The balance of these new mechanics will probably not be perfect for the beta, but we hope to hear your feedback and, together, get the full update out by November.

With the beta release announcement next week, we will also talk about what work is remaining for the full update and what you will be able to do in the beta.

Now let’s talk about what we have been doing since our last update.


This month we finished configuring and adding all the new items and machines to the game. We are especially excited by the new decoration options and the new additions to espressos and brewers. We also finished configuring the three rosters, animating all the machines, and adding all the remaining descriptions. Check out some of the new items!



There are many more items, but you will have to discover them in-game; we are trying to keep some surprises for next week ;)


Historically on Coffee Shop Tycoon, you can unlock items by leveling up, buying companies, or doing researches, now we are adding another way to unlock new items.

With the addition of roasting challenges, we decided to have the new higher-level machines and roasters locked behind what we call a Milestone Challenge. You will complete these challenges by creating new roasting profiles in your HQ. These milestones are also tied with the coffee varieties and coffee regions. Milestones will be increasingly more challenging and will help you become a professional roaster.




Speaking of challenges, the system is now fully functional. We have been roasting and completing challenges all week long. We plan to keep doing this and tweaking the difficulty and rewards next week. We are also working on the first Milestone Challenge that will unlock a new machine when you start playing the beta. We will keep adding more milestone challenges through the beta period until they cover all the new machines and the four coffee regions.





We have talked about varieties before and even showcased the screen a couple of updates ago; with this latest push, we are also adding the world coffee screen. On this screen, you can get an overview of what coffee varieties are available in each continent and what coffee notes you can expect per continent. You will start with one continent unlocked, and as you progress through the world of roasting, you will get the chance to complete new Milestone missions to unlock the remaining regions.





Another change coming to the game is the addition of a final reputation level, Diamond Bean. This is the next tier after Golden Bean, and to unlock it, you will need to sell coffee in your store with an exceptional grading. This new mechanic is also required to achieve Silver Bean and Gold Bean.

Each rating has a different coffee grading requirement, starting with 85 to achieve Silver Bean, 90 for Golden Bean, and 95 for Diamond Bean. For each level, you will need to sell at least 20 coffees with this grading. Hopefully, you keep an exceptional service since you will need to sell the coffee again in case you lose your reputation level, but don’t worry, this is just a requirement for the top reputation levels.




You might have amazing baristas in your team, but to brew great coffee, you also need great equipment. For that reason, we are introducing a new stat for your brewers and espressos, Max Brewing Quality. You can brew any coffee in any machine, but it will not realize its full potential unless you have the right equipment. You will get a notification if it is time to upgrade your machines. The machine stats will reduce the coffee grading until you get a better machine, so better to be ready with adequate equipment when roasting amazing beans.

This grading is important because your customers now expect a different coffee grading depending on your reputation. This expectation is slightly different between customers, but overall higher reputation means higher demands.





As you can see, roasting is crucial to having a successful store and becoming the ultimate coffee connoisseur!

We are excited to finally start sharing this update with you and hear about all your thoughts and suggestions.


As a final surprise, we plan to stream a gameplay session and talk about some of the new mechanics and answer any questions you may have, we don’t have the exact date and time right now, but we will update you once we do.

Thank you for reading this far, and we hope to see you next week for all the instructions about how to download the beta and all the information about it, plus more details about the stream. As always, enjoy your coffee.

You can follow us on Twitter @RiffStudios for more updates.

if you love Coffee Shop Tycoon, and want to get some cool new logos for your shop join our discord! 😊

Hello everyone, I hope you have been enjoying summer, at least in the northern hemisphere, we have certainly had. Today's update is a little longer than usual, given the last update was in July. Since then, we have implemented the majority of the remaining features for the roasting update. The next milestone will focus on wrapping things up to publish a beta, more information about that further down.


Last time we talked about the progress on the coffee bag creator. We are happy to announce that the creator is now complete, including loading and saving custom designs. This is a feature we really wanted to have; we know making new designs is very cool, but we also wanted to have a way to reuse existing designs to speed up the progress of roasting a new bean, especially if you're going to have a recurring type of roasts like real-world coffee roasters do, or simply a common branding between your beans.



A nice feature of the bag creator is that it allows you to add custom text to your bag and text representing specific properties of your coffee, like country of origin, flavor and aroma notes, name of the coffee, etc. Every time you load a design with these text elements, they update to match the information of the bean you just roasted. The store logo also works this way, if you decide to change your company's logo to a new one, the new roasted coffees will also have your new logo.






Another major area that we focused on was roaster animations and sounds. In this milestone, we completed the set of animations and sound effects for the three roasters we are adding to the game. You can see these animations while roasting new beans from the HQ or the store. We are very excited about the result, and we hope you enjoy the soothing sounds of cracking coffee or the calming flow of coffee beans over a cooling tray; as someone commented on the Twitter post, you can almost smell the video.




We also updated the new roasting screen with more controls. We want to give you all the tools to have fun while roasting; this includes playing with time and pausing to allow you to plan your next move and not get frustrated. You can also see the entire flow of roasting in the following video and the roaster animations once more in action.




Now, a quick refresh on coffee varieties and how they tie to roasting challenges. When you start roasting your first coffee, you will notice that you won't have access to the rarest higher quality coffee varieties from the start. To become a great roaster and have stellar coffees, you will need to unlock higher-quality coffees. These coffees are unlocked through roasting points that you can obtain by completing roasting challenges.

We are putting a lot of time into this system to ensure that challenges can be exciting and fun to do.
We have two different categories for roasting challenges:

These are your main story, hand-crafted challenges. They tell a story about your progress as a roaster and unlock unique rewards. Those rewards include coffees from new continents, new roasters, and new machines like espressos and brewers.

These challenges are procedurally generated, and the rewards are usually roasting points or money. They can also have an expiration time if they have higher rewards.



All challenges have objectives that can be accomplished by roasting only one coffee or a series of coffees with specific properties. An example of a challenge can be: "Roast a coffee from Africa with 82 points or more." Another example could be "Roast 5 coffees from South America and roast 2 Dark Roast coffees".

We are still working on finishing this system to ensure that all challenges can be completed and are relevant to your current level. We are also adding the option to skip non-milestone challenges if they don't sound exciting or rewarding enough for you.

Challenges are generated in a time-based manner. We are thinking of having only three procedurally generated challenges at a time, so after you complete or skip one of these challenges, a timer will kick in, and a new challenge will be generated after "x" time to fill the spot.


With new properties for coffee and roasting, it was necessary to update the existing beans in the game; previously, these beans only had one important property, quality, represented by a number of stars. Now beans are moving to the new model that is closer to real-life coffee.



Coffee is now graded by a score; customers will have a different expectation for this score depending on the reputation level of your store. Besides the score, we also added information about the flavor notes, origin, and other properties to the original coffee beans and updated the Supply and Brewing screens to reflect these changes. On a game that focuses around coffee, we feel that having more information about the coffee you are selling and roasting will add a new level of realism to the game.

Hopefully, you will learn a bit about the fantastic world of coffee while playing; we've certainly learned a lot while working on the game and have come to appreciate coffee in a very different way.






So, what is next? As you can see, the update is coming together, but we still have a bit of work left to finish it. We are spending the rest of September finishing the roasting challenges system, adding all the new items to the game, implementing the new location missions, and tweaking and playing with the new systems to ensure an excellent experience for the beta. Our plan is to have a beta by mid-October. We always have open betas, so if you want to test out the next update you will be able to, we will have an exact release date for the beta on the next dev diaries.

As always, thank you for playing and supporting the game, we love working on the project, and we hope all the new features will also make you love the game. Thanks for reading this far, and enjoy your coffee.

You can follow us on Twitter @RiffStudios for more updates.

if you love Coffee Shop Tycoon, and want to get some cool new logos for your shop join our discord! 😊

Hello everyone! I hope you are enjoying a cold brew this summer in the northern hemisphere or a velvety latte this winter in the southern hemisphere. Wherever you are, we wanted to share with you more news around the development of the latest update and talk about the new mechanics.


The roasting mechanic is now also working inside the stores and has a new icon. Once you have purchased a new roaster, you can assign an employee to it. This will allow you to roast any roasting profile created from the HQ as long as the beans are still fresh and available. Like brewing, roasting takes some time; after the roast is complete, the new custom coffee will appear in your inventory, and you will be able to brew it like any other coffee. Custom coffee will have better grades than the ones you can purchase, and they will be less expensive to produce; additionally, higher reputation levels like Bronze Bean, Silver Bean, and Gold Bean will now be tied with custom coffee because let’s be honest if you are a trending and fantastic coffee shop you might as well create your own coffee. 😊





This month we also made tremendous progress with the new screens. The brand-new Green Beans screen showcases the properties of the coffee beans you can use to create new roasting profiles from the HQ. These beans will change depending on which varieties and regions you unlock; they will also refresh constantly unless you make a roasting profile for them. When you create a roasting profile, the selected beans will be around until you finish roasting all the stock, or they become too old to roast.



Speaking of coffee varieties, we also added a screen where you can unlock new varieties with roasting points. Varieties are crucial to complete roasting challenges which reward you with Roasting Points that you can use to unlock more varieties or roast high-quality beans. The expected quality of each variety defines different tiers; not all varieties will create highly rated coffees. Still, they will work as stepping stones to progress your roasting skills.



Another new screen is the roasting hub, here you can check out the roasting profiles you have created, check the roasting challenge you are currently tracking, see information about how many regions and varieties you have unlocked, and finally create a new roasting profile. This is the main screen you will see when interacting with the new roasting department in your HQ.




Another primary system that we want to show you is the coffee bag creator! This creator is your final step for showcasing your coffee. For the past weeks, we started working with an artist (you can follow here on Twitter at @nynydg) to create different shapes and patterns that you can use when designing a coffee bag; here are some of the designs and explorations.






She came up with 80 different shapes and patterns that you will be able to use to customize your bag; all these elements can have custom colors and combine with text to show your brand and the name of your roasted coffee. All these shapes live in layers that combine like an image editing software so you can rearrange their order and overlap them to create unique designs. Without further ado, here is the bag creator in action.



We are still working on adding support for text and different fonts, recent colors for the color picker, and the ability to save and load your bag designs. We are very excited about how it is turning out, and we hope you are too when you start roasting and selling your own coffee.


Last but not least, we are also working on a powerful system that will support the roasting challenges. This system is flexible enough to be used for the missions currently in the game and any future games that we develop. The idea behind the system is to be able to define a set of requirements to complete a challenge that can be done in steps or at the same time and provide a reward if all the conditions are met. The system also supports having a sequence of challenges, similar to what you can see now on the current missions in the game. We are still testing this system. Given it is not a visual-facing feature, we only have the following debugging screens, but we are excited about how this will allow us to create interesting roasting challenges for you.




Thanks for reading this far and supporting the game. We can’t wait for you to play the new update, we are doing everything to get it in your hands as fast as possible. Thanks for being patient and sticking with us, we hope you have an amazing week and enjoy your coffee!

You can follow us on Twitter @RiffStudios for more updates.

if you love Coffee Shop Tycoon, and want to get some cool new logos for your shop join our discord! 😊

You can follow us on Twitter @RiffStudios for more updates.

if you love Coffee Shop Tycoon, and want to get some cool new logos for your shop join our discord! 😊

Hello everyone, we are back with another development update for the Roasting update, we have made good progress since the last update, focusing on polishing the roasting mechanics, creating the roasting challenge system, and finishing the 3D models for the location.

The roasting mechanics are ready! We still have to tweak some numbers and finish adding animation, sounds, and UI, but for the most part, the ability to roast beans and sell them in your store is already working. First, you start by selecting a bean, picking an employee from any of your stores, and finally starting the roasting process. Here you tweak the heat levels to achieve the desired tasting notes, discovered notes will be visible as long as the coffee bean is in the market, you are ready to finish your roast once all notes have been revealed and the bean is no longer underdeveloped.
In the result screen, you are able to see how well your roast went and get a final score for your roast profile. The skill of your employees along with the bean variety and coffee notes determine your final score. Only employees with the same roasting skill or higher will be able to roast these beans, so having one rock star is not enough to sell this coffee at all your locations.

*UI in development

Back at your store, clicking on a roaster with an assigned employee will allow you to roast those beans, once roasted, they will appear in your supplies as any other bean. Existing beans have been modified to include the same stats as roasted beans (score, notes, roast).


*UI in development

Depending on your reputation, customers will expect higher scored beans, and just like décor rating, specific coffee gradings will now be required to achieve bronze, silver, and gold ratings in your store.
That’s not all, we are also introducing the concept of roasting challenges!

To become the best roaster and sell the best coffee you will have to prove you are one with the coffee bean, so to inspire you to become a coffee master we are adding Roasting Challenges!
When you start roasting, you won’t have access to all the coffee beans in the world, coffee beans are unlocked by regions and varieties.
Regions can be unlocked by completing specific roasting challenges, each region has a different set of possible coffee notes, some have Fruity coffee, some others Nutty or Sweet notes, and not only that! Coffee Beans can also be unlocked by varieties. Varieties have different quality levels and are unlocked with roasting points that are collected by completing roasting challenges. As you progress in your roasting adventure you will unlock higher quality varieties and more exclusive coffee to sell in your store.
Roasting challenges will also unlock unique machines including Espressos, Brewers, Roasters, and a new Grinder. We hope you have fun completing these challenges and learn how to roast the most incredible virtual cup of coffee.

We have a name for the new location, and it is “Emerald City”! This is the nickname of the city of Seattle, where most of the development of Coffee Shop Tycoon has taken place, this is also a city where our dreams as game developers started becoming a reality, so we couldn’t find a more fitting name for the location.
As you can see from the pictures below, the new location is almost ready! This is the largest location in the game so far, and we have had a lot of fun planning and designing the space, we hope you also have a lot of fun playing in it.





Emerald City is a big space where you can feature your new Roaster and large working station, it also has an alley which can be bought as an extension to your shop. Once bought, the alley will be converted into a magic place where coffee and city merge into a single experience.
At this point, the only thing remaining is to add the location's missions, and some traffic to make the environment feel like a living place.
We have also started configuring the new items, all models and textures are ready but we are still configuring them to work with the game since we have prioritized finishing up the roasting mechanics instead.

We are very close to having all the main systems working, we are currently focusing on finishing the remaining UI, animations, sound, missions, bean bag customization, and other final details before we can give a definitive release window. Considering the size of the update we will publish it first as an open beta, we hope to give you a date for the beta next month and show you more finalized screens and videos of all the work we are doing. Thank you for all your patience and for supporting the game, we are truly doing everything we can to bring this to you as soon as possible but we are still a small team and the coffee intake is already pretty high :D

You can follow us on Twitter @RiffStudios for more updates. See you soon on the next update and thanks for reading this far, as always enjoy your coffee! And stay safe.

if you love Coffee Shop Tycoon, and want to get some cool new logos for your shop join our discord! 😊

Hello everyone, welcome to the first post in our series of Dev Diaries, the idea around these diaries is to keep updating you often with all the development news and stories around Coffee Shop Tycoon. This is going to be in the same format as previous announcements, the only difference is that we want to publish them more consistently even if there is nothing super flashy to show to you, on those cases we’ll try to come up with fun stories around development or delve a little into some mechanics and the reasoning behind them. For this week, however, we have some flashy cool things to show to you!
Last month has been super interesting, we have made good progress on the Roasting update and we also spent some time doing virtual activities in the studio, improving our Discord, and updating the store description of Coffee Shop Tycoon.


First, let’s talk about Roasting. If you didn’t know, the next big update will include the ability to roast your own beans, and a new location, plus new machines to brew and grind your coffee to perfection. Now that you know what roasting is let’s talk about this month's progress. This month we finished the “Green bean Generator”! This system is in charge of creating all the varieties of beans that you are going to use for roasting, we have a database of over 1000 coffee beans from around the world! So this system is in charge of reading these beans and adding unique notes depending on the region, in coffee lingo, “notes” refers to the series of flavors and smells you can perceive when drinking coffee, as a roaster you will have the responsibility of extracting these notes to create a rich and tasty cup of coffee. The available coffee beans that you can see in the HQ will depend on your progression, more about that in a bit.
For reference, here are some of the beans that can be generated with this new system.



Another large chunk of this month was allocated to developing internal tools that could help us import and test content faster, specifically the items you can buy and place in your store. When I started developing Coffee Shop Tycoon, I was pretty much an amateur game dev fresh out of college so I didn’t know all the magical benefits of using editor scripts or how to make them. So, every item you see in the game has been configured manually to work with the game systems, this means that I had to import the 3D model, attach some scripts to it, make sure the pivots and colliders are fine, attach some other scripts, change tags and layers for the object, create points that will occupy slots in the game grid, and so on… This process takes around 15 to 20 minutes per object, simply to be able to put it in the world. When you are adding 15 or more new objects you can imagine how that can escalate pretty quickly even without considering human error when applying the configuration. Editor scripts to the rescue! Now after learning the benefits of editor scripts and spending time making them, we can now import and configure the same object in less than a minute, you can see how this will not only make our lives easier but helps us iterate over content a lot faster than we used to. And for the kicker, here is the editor script in action!



Now, to art! This month we have been working mostly on polishing the new models and working on the new location. And speaking of the new location, drum roll please…tr tr tr tr tr









Welcome to “Emerald City”, we are happy with how the new location is coming along, we still need to import it in the engine and start adding some nice lighting and game systems to be able to play inside the new building, but the modeling and texturing are ready and we are excited to bring this new place to life and fill it with the energizing aroma of fresh coffee, new machines, and new items. You can follow us on Twitter where we will be posting screenshots while we add the new location to the game or wait for the next dev diaries to see more screenshots.
Now, do you remember we talked about unlocking beans depending on your progression? Well, these next weeks we are working on a feature called “Roasting challenges”. When the new update is out and you head over to your HQ you will see that beans from some regions of the world will be locked, but don’t worry you will be able to unlock beans from all around the world by completing roasting challenges, these challenges will test your roasting skills and yield amazing rewards, an example of a roasting challenge is as follows “Roast a bean from South America with at least 80 points from the Bourbon variety.“ We’ll be sharing more details from this feature along with some screenshots once we have it up and working.


Having a fun place for our community to discuss the game and providing a direct channel to hear about feedback and ideas is important to us, for that reason we also spent some time improving our Discord and adding some new things to welcome new members. Now, when you join the Coffee Shop Tycoon discord you will be able to pick a favorite drink and be assigned to a team where you can get some exclusive in-game logos that you can import and use for your shop, we need some help to reach at least 7000 members in order to make the discord discoverable and public, we are still far from that but hopefully, with your help, we will one day. So, if you love Coffee Shop Tycoon, and want to get some cool new logos join our discord! 😊



A here is a screenshot of the new unique logos!




Finally, another fun virtual activity we had in the studio was a small game jam over the weekend, the idea behind these game jams is to help us learn and come up with fun ideas for this game or future games that we develop, this game jam topic was “Survival”, and we tried to make a survival around sound, here are just some of the screenshots and videos from that day.




That is all for now, hopefully, you like the new things we are adding to the update, as always let us know what you think here, at Twitter or Discord (join join 😉), have a great weekend and enjoy your coffee.

Hello! I hope you are having a great week, here on Puget Sound we are preparing to be covered in snow soon, so stocking those coffee beans to get us through the week. As some of you might have noticed there was a small update pushed last week, this update fixes a game breaking bug that prevented you from closing the Employee information screen if the screen was open during the Du Latte Awards. We validated other screens and it seems that only this screen had the problem, it looks like there was a glitch with the unity controls that made the close button fly away from the screen when it disabled and re-enabled. Other than that fix there isn’t much else on the update, we have been focused on the Roasting update so we have everyone working on getting this update to you as soon as possible.
Speaking of roasting we have some cool new working screens to show you the progress and talk about the new mechanics.

First, we are introducing a new skill for your employees “Roaster”. This skill works similarly to the other existing skills, your employee will level up the skill through roasting or by taking some of the new trainings. You are also able to find employees that are specialized in roasting. Employees on existing saves will also have this skill, so you will be able to start roasting right away.






Roasting can be done in the HQ and your coffee shop, the first step is to go to your HQ, here you will find a new Roasting area where you can browse green beans from several origins and different properties, we are actually working right now on the system that generates all this beans. From there, you can pick a type of bean and start making a new “Roast Profile”. You will need to pick someone from your existing employees to do this, their roasting skill will be important to achieve a higher score for your roast. During roasting you will come across several flavor and aroma notes that are present in the bean, depending on the temperature you use for your roast you can try to get different notes. Once you have discovered these notes on that specific bean you can try to get other notes.



The selected bean, achieved notes, and the employee skill level will define the final score for your coffee beans. These scores will be important to your customer, a higher reputation store will require better coffee beans in order to progress. Bronze, silver, and gold bean ratings will be updated to take into consideration specialty coffee and custom beans.



Back in the store, any employee with enough skill level will be able to roast the “Roast Profile” you just created from the HQ while there are enough supplies of the specific green bean. Green beans will change over time.

We are also working on system to customize bean bags so you can add your own style to your new roasted beans, we will share more details on another dev update.

Finally, we are going to leave you with some new renders from our talented artist, thanks for reading so far and enjoy your coffee.

Hello everyone! I hope some of you are ready to take a deserved vacation and enjoy the holidays even if it is just a dinner with your household or an online family dinner like I plan to do. The last couple of months have been interesting, we have been working on the new update while still working on localization and bug fixes, I wanted to give you an update on the things we are doing for the next update and delight you with some new renders.

The next update is all about allowing you to create the ultimate coffee company, which means that you will have a new location and new options for your company, mainly roasting and selling your own coffee! The new location is inspired by top reserve coffee shops that showcase the amazing world of coffee, it has a modern/industrial vibe and it comes with a lot of new store items and equipment. We don’t have a render for the location ready yet but we certainly have a lot of renders for the new items and equipment!































As you can see we have been working hard to bring you more content and expand the world of Coffee Shop Tycoon. These are some of the new items coming to the game but there are still more to come with this update.

Now back to Roasting, we have been thinking about adding roasting for a while now, but it is certainly not something we want to add lightly, it has to tie in with the game mechanics and progression on the game, for the past 6 months or so there has been a lot of investigation and design to come up with a Roasting system that would be fun and work with the game.

Roasting is going to work similar to the drink creation but it has its unique mechanics, it all starts by having a new skill for your employees, just like the Barista, Speed, and Service skill, now there is a Roaster skill, you will be able to train this skill, level it up while roasting or recruit employees that focus on this skill. Once the Roasting station is unlocked in the HQ you will be able to go in there and create a new "Roasting Profile". This screen will show you the green beans currently in the market with their origin and attributes, you will be able to grab these beans and start roasting a new batch which will become a new "Roasting Profile".


Work in Progress

This is a manual process where you control the Roaster by increasing and lowering the heat to extract different notes and flavors from the coffee. If you successfully manage to create a new batch without burning the coffee, a group of coffee tasters will grade your coffee. You will then be able to select the branding of your beans and save your "Roasting Profile". Back in the store, you will be able to place roasters in your shop and hire employees to roast these roasting profiles while those green beans are still available. Finally, your roasted coffee will show up in your coffee supply and you will be able to use it as any other bean.

To make this more fun we will be also tweaking the way store reputation works to take into consideration special beans, customers expectations and stats will also be tweaked to work with the roasted beans.

To sum it up, the next update will have a new feature "Roasting", a new location, and new items. This location will have missions that will be only completed by Roasting new delicious beans but we will see how Roasting can be introduced earlier in the game probably during the 4th location.

We will keep updating you with new screens and renders as we keep working on this update, and we'll let you know as soon as there is a beta available to try all these things out! Thanks for reading, happy holidays, and enjoy your coffee!

Follow us on Twitter @RiffStudios
Join the conversation on Discord Riff Studios Discord

Hello everyone! I have exciting news today, Coffee Shop Tycoon now has Steam Cloud! Sync your game progress between any PC and Mac. Custom drinks and logos also sync so you can continue managing your Shop anywhere you go.

In order to support Cloud Saves, we needed to make some changes on how the previews of custom drinks and logos are saved, Windows users are not impacted by this but if you are a Mac player you will need to do one small step to recover your custom drink previews.

If you are playing on a Mac you will notice that your custom drinks' preview on an existing save is missing, to fix this you will need to move some files.

1. Go to this folder on finder "~/Library/Application Support/Riff Studios"
   
2. Copy every drink preview you see into the "Coffee Shop Tycoon" folder and rename each file to remove "Coffee Shop Tycoon\\" from the name

Sorry for the problems in Mac but we hope you find Cloud Saves a good addition to the game, thank you for all your support and enjoy your coffee.

Follow us on Twitter @RiffStudios
Join the conversation on Discord Riff Studios Discord

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.

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.

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

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.

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.



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.





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.

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.

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.