February is more sunny and warm than ever, almost hot, and so is the work on Coffee Noir now!

We’re working on the final batch of the game and refining some of its elements. We were also able to confirm that we have solutions to some concerns mentioned on Twitter.

• The work on the Marketing UI is continued, currently we focus on the mechanics and their descriptions for development.
  
• We confirmed that we’ll be able to implement audio accessibility with an option to switch it off and on. Read more here.
  
• The Lead Artist works on one of the comics that appear in the last part of the game. Exciting noir stuff we obviously won’t spoil!
  
• Meanwhile, a new website for Doji is being developed. It’s actually going to be much more simple and working more smoothly than it is.

If you have any questions, feel free to contact us. Contact/follow us here on Steam, Discord, Facebook and Twitter. See you there!

Here’s our first dev update of 2020!

• Part of our forces had to be switched to another B2B project, the rest is working hard on finishing batch of the CN game.
  
• Despite that, we designed and drew the Marketing UI from scratch, including the new mechanics. We made campaign management more simple and intiuitive.
  
• Remember the office we showed at the beginning of January? It is now fully implemented into the game build.
  
• We also handled the most complicated and complex UI in the game, Management. It’s also going to be more user-friendly.
  
• A new board for viewing quests was designed.
  
• We finished an interesting dining scene, where food is relevant to the storyline. Best kind of food!

…and more. 2020 is a year of mixing working on other projects with our favourite one – Coffee Noir. We expanded our team and work on improving the management as well! See you in the next dev update.

Happy New Year! We are entering the 2020's; will they bring coffeemania like in Coffee Noir? We hope so, because we are ready to celebrate coffee!

This comparison shows what we have achieved in 2019 in terms of overhauling the game's quality. The office was completely re-drawn. It will have clickable elements that will serve as a menu. From this place you will access the various UI of Marketing, Sales, etc. we've been showing here.

2020 will bring even more novelties! Stay tuned.

New office:



Old office:

That's the concept of the new Sales UI in the game!





Here the player can see avaliable clients, with which they signed a contract or they can schedule a business meeting to estabilish cooperation. We wanted to remove boring tables and breathe new life into the UI by presenting the player's results in an interesting retro-futuristic form.

As always, we include the old version for comparison.

It’s time for December’s second Dev Update. We’re working hard on Coffee Noir, but also preparing for Christmas.

• The UI window of Sales is almost finished; the graphics have been prepared and sent to development.
  
• The new version of the Investigation Board is ready for the programmers to implement; it underwent some small changes and UX improvement since we last showed it.
  
• Other B2B projects we work on right now and will work on in 2020 were discussed as well. We’re a business tycoon in real life, heading into 2020’s just like Arthur Oliver in Coffee Noir!
  
• We discussed about how to divide our work with checking dialogue files. We need to do one big check to confirm whether they are essentially correct in regards to the tycoon part of the game and if there are no storyline mistakes. This is our most important task in this real-life tycoon here.
  
• We also talked about the methods of adding audiodescription to our dialogues in a way that allows switching it on and off. We want to allow a setting like this, because some of you might want to switch the sound descriptions off.
  
• And the most important thing, we’re preparing a Christmas Eve dinner in our workplace on the last day before the Christmas holiday! Each of us will bring something delicious to eat.

Of course, we also continue tasks mentioned in our previous update. If you want to know more about our audio accessibility, see this Dev Blog!

Recently, the topic of game accessibility is popular in Poland. Accessibility means adjusting games and game settings to the needs of people with disabilities.

We support that idea and we had a pleasure of sponsoring PGG Jam: All Play vol.4 last weekend! It’s a game jam dedicated to educating game developers about different disabilities and barriers that might stop some players from fully experiencing their games.



At the PGG Jam one of our team members – Karolina Stachowiak, the Social Media Specialist, gave a lecture about audio accessibility. Proper audio settings and subtitles, to be precise. She has a hearing disability, but wears cochlear implants that let her hear.

Coffee Noir will have text indicating sighing, coughing or other such sounds that appear in dialogues so that detectives with auditory disabilities do not lose anything from the conversations. That reduces barriers for fully able people as well – for example parents who play with very silent sound or no sound so that they can pay attention to what their little kids are doing. Accessibility actually supports a wide range of players.



Also, the dialogues continue only after you click a new option and the text in our cutscene comics also continues only after you click anywhere. This allows you to read it at your own pace.

What is more, we have accessible sound settings. There are separate volume sliders for music, SFX and voice. This way, every player can adjust the in-game sound to their needs and preferences. The screen below is a work in progress.



We hope that our dialogue text, as well as sound will be helpful to those who will play Coffee Noir. Currently, we are making sure that the audio description of the sounds mentioned above is in all dialogues we have finished so far!

November ended already, how did all that time pass just like that? It’s almost Christmas. Must. Resist. Playing. Christmas. Songs. This is what we’ve been up to during the previous week:

• We discussed the UI of Clues and implemented last week’s ideas, with new mechanics and an improved design. It’s beginning to look a lot like an amazing UI.
  
• Anita and Szymon are working on connections between Clues in all the chapters.
  
• Our Lead Artist continues drawing the interactive office and our translators continue the game text translations.
  
• Kamil has started the work on voiceovers outsourcing.
  
• The writer continues preparing and tweaking dialogues for the last chapters of Coffee Noir.
  
• We are working on specific mechanics of marketing and its UI. Last Christmas you followed us, and this year we will share our work in progress.

Visit our Discord server to discuss the changes and be the first one to see the updates. We share them there first. Also, remember to wishlist Coffee Noir!

Another round of our strategic adventure with Coffee Noir has started!

• A new quest for us! Our team is working on a completely new version of the mechanics of linking clues on the Investigation Board! We’ve developed them further so that they allow the player to deduce information from the clues like a true detective. On Monday, we’ve discussed the mechanics and created mockups for the programmers.
  
• Aleksandra has leveled up, but keeps grinding the XP: she’s finished the mockup for Management UI, so we started developing it, and she started working on overhauling the next UI.
  
• We continue transcribing dialogues to twinery. It’s a boring, but very satisfying quest.
  
• Jakub had to be delegated to another B2B project, so we’ve temporarily lost a battle unit.
  
• We’re polishing the ending of the storyline. The general plot is ready, but we need to make briefs for artists and writers to nicely put it all together in film noir style. That’s a very important mission!
  
• More comics are being drawn.
  
• Anita has lost a lot of HP, so she’s resting today. Remember to drink a lot of health potions and rest at the checkpoint, Anita!

We hope to win this round quickly and move on with more quests to deliver the best Coffee Noir possible. See you next week!

Hello, it’s us with our second Dev Update! At our meeting this week we discussed multiple functionalities and UI changes in the game.

• We improved the dialogue screen a lot. The visuals and UI have been tweaked.
  
• You can see that UI in the screenshots below this update! The dialogue screens are a lot clearer now, they went a long way since the initial design.
  
• We changed the speech bubbles, the design of the “console” at the bottom of the screen, the location where Arthur’s dialogue appears – in the “console” instead of separate bubbles – and we added a new Arthur’s portrait.
  
• We talked about the Investigation UI and its functionalities. It’ll work in a better, more understandable way.
  
• The process of starting a new game has been improved. Previously, the database loading took a lot of time, now the loading screen lasts 2 seconds.
  
• Our Lead Artist continues drawing graphics and the Game Designer continues preparing briefs for the visuals for the last chapters of the gameplay.
  
• The coffee consumption in the office rises, as we implement all the improvements we decided on.
  
• After adding new functionalities, the coffee consumption grows even more, because we need to fix some game elements. Adding modified views, dividing the game into chapters and new functionalities have disturbed the balance of the game. Łukasz started remodeling variable influences, prices and multipliers in his excel sheets, so that the game economy would be sensible and balanced again… He has a PhD in economics, so we hope he knows what he’s doing.
  
• We also thought a lot about UX of new in-game windows, some of which we’ve already shown in our social media.

This is the old design of our dialogue UI:



This is the new design of our dialogue UI:



That is all for this week. Let us know if you like the changes in the dialogue screen!

The Lead Artist continues her work on Arthur's office. Here's a work in progress sketch of the computer and items on his desk.

The computer is inspired by mechanical calculators from the 50's (see the examples below the sketch). Are you excited to manage your business with it?



...and some examples of mechanical calculators: