Slime Café Devlog - Production Sprint 1

Good day everyone! After a restful Christmas break and a couple weeks of detailed planning, we are back and ready to crack on with development once more.

Entering the full production stage now, there is plenty to do and prepare - and a whole bunch of playtesting that needs to get done. Keep an eye out for upcoming tests, scheduled to release every 2 weeks.

In the meantime enjoy this devlog!

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Sprint 1 - Devlog - 1st February 2021 - 5th February 2021

Goal:

Our key goal for this first sprint is integrating the stages of play - In preparation for a complete game day within the next 4 weeks (2 sprints).

By the end of this sprint we are hoping to have the narrative phase and prep phase functional with some placeholder/draft dialogue as well as a functional title screen. As well as these, the drink making phase is being expanded with new machines, in preparation for a larger cast of drinks in the future.

This sprint includes a lot of small improvements as well, building on feedback from our last build - Including a resizing of the cafe and mouse sensitivity fixes. Expect more details in the changelog when the update goes live.

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Progress:

This week has gotten off to a slow start as the start of term brings many new lectures and workshops - but more and more of the game continues to come together every day.

Art Corner:

With the game's art style receiving many compliments during our institutions “Demo Day” - The art team has taken this momentum and continued to work hard to make our game as visually appealing as possible.

Kathryn and Sapphire have been piecing together the NPC’s yet again, expanding the wide range of body shapes available to now include a nerdy archetype and office worker archetype. The character generator also finally includes legwear!

With legwear and footwear available now, the character creator has flagged up some issues that needed correcting. Kathryn in particular has been working to correct any issues - for example while our customers are finally wearing trousers in the cafe, some were willing to be a little loose with it…

As for Jemma, she has been focusing her efforts on making the cafe itself feel more spacious and pleasant. She has been expanding the cafe to feel larger and offer more space, as well as placing colliders to prevent falling out of the map and tidying up the inspector in general. Alongside this - Jemma has also been implementing the new clothing options and customer types. Lastly, she is also incorporating the timer into the gameplay.

These are all small changes that make the scene far more pleasant of an experience to occupy. The previous layout felt quite claustrophobic even without additional drink making machines that are still yet to be added.

Programmers Den:

Down in the programmers den, Jake has been helping expand the main drink making phase of the game. One big feedback point we had at Demo Day was needing feedback from customers, without it the game felt quite flat and basic. With that in mind, Jakes main focus has been to remedy this by creating a voice line system for customers - giving them all a little personality as they request their drinks.

He has also been working to make the scene more lively, creating a queue of customers coming in thirsty for a delicious slimy brew.

Design Café:

As our lead and sole designer, Warren has been working hard to improve the player experience as much as possible.

His main priority this week has been the title screen, incorporating all kinds of functions to help give the player control over their play - such as volume settings, screen size controls and even a jukebox to listen to the various music the game will feature.

Alongside this, some tweaks to the in game audio will allow the narrative scene to contain various dialogue noises and effects that will make it more entertaining to interact with.

Writing Forge:

At the world forge, Kim has taken a step back from expanding the world itself and is now focusing on the gameplay story beats themselves. Each work phase will be started and followed by a section of the game's main story, later followed by a chance to talk to your co-workers.

We can't share much about it yet, but slime café will contain many secrets you will get to explore - so look forward to it!

As for myself, I've been focusing on the narrative integration itself. By establishing all the characters and scenes we need in fungus ahead of integration, it will become much easier to integrate and iterate the story itself. With the scene fully set up, we can integrate some narrative segments to test them out in the next playtesting build.

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Sprint Retrospective:

With half of the sprint complete, it's always important to step back for a moment and take a look at our progress towards our goal.

The title menu and expansion of customer visuals is fortunately coming along as planned, while some of the features took longer to integrate then planned, they are overall on track to conclude before the bi-weekly build and playtest.

Unfortunately our resident programmer Jake has fallen ill recently, limiting our momentum in that area. With a few cuts to less important tasks, the key feature of this build (the 3 phases) should still be achievable. The main focus of this sprint is ensuring the phases can transition and contain placeholder content, which ultimately we are on track to complete.

The biggest takeaway from this sprint so far is how we use user stories. These are a feature of agile development where we take a user's perspective, as the player, developer or more, and create a clear statement as to what we want. Tasks are then assigned to this user story depending on which tasks will help us achieve that small goal.

We took a careful approach to planning out user stories going this term, but still they appear to be a bit too broad - with some of these sprints containing tasks that we cannot work on until later in development. Going forward we will make a conscious effort to break up our user stories into various stages of development as much as possible.

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This marks the end of this week's Devlog. Remember to follow us here on itch and twitter so you can get the latest updates when our builds go live!

Expect our next build somewhere between the 12th and 15 of February.

Until then, stay safe out there~

• Dan Baker, Producer and writer of Slime Café