Welcome all to another Slime Café devlog! With our first sprint of the term coming to a close, we look back at how it's gone so far and how close we are to our goals.

While some of the team have suffered with their health in the last week, the team has done their best to compensate and ensure everyone is looking after themselves.

Shortly after this Devlog goes live - We will also be releasing the newest builds ready to play! This time 2 builds will be tested separately, as we want targeted feedback on the narrative and gameplay elements before they are merged together.

Enjoy!

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Sprint 1 - Devlog - 8th February 2021 - 12th 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)” - I mentioned this goal last week, alongside our ambition to bring the prep and break phase into gameplay and pack both with narrative.

Coming to the end of the sprint now, we have mostly achieved this goal! While the phases do not flow together yet, this sprint will see 2 separate builds and tests being run side by side. The key things we are testing is the Narrative enjoyment/coherency and the quality of the gameplay.

We also set out to make lots of small improvements, as well as put a title screen and options menu in the game. At the top of this blog you can see some in development concept work of how the title screen will eventually look.

With both builds being fine tuned today, you can expect them posted online for passive playtesting Monday 15th Feb. Featured with them will be a changelog and several new forms to fill out and offer your opinions. These will also be emailed out on Monday evening to those who signed up for our mailing list!

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Progress: This week has had slow moments thanks to people's health, but we push ever onward! A huge amount has come together in the past 5 days, ranging from the narrative system integration to further development of in game characters.

Art Corner:

As always, it's been a busy one for our art team. Jemma has done a wide range of things this week, including several tweaks to the customer generator to prevent some of the curious issues we showcased last week. Alongside this, she has also been developing a loading screen and title screen. While both are still in progress, they will help communicate the aesthetic of the game and provide an interesting visual scene when you start the game.

In addition, Jemma has also developed a custom font for the game to help make everything as visually appealing as possible! While it only extends to certain UI elements for now, in the future it will be used across the game to make for a consistent experience.

Kathryn and Sapphire have, as usual, been focusing their efforts on our wonderful customers. An important aspect of Slime Cafe is the randomly generated customers, creating lots of different unique and interesting people to occupy the cafe. To this end, Sapphire has been working to create new archetypes and body shapes for the clothing items to be added to.

Kathryn has been focusing on fixing over creation, tweaking issues with the hair and legwear certain customer body types would bug out with. Alongside this, she's been working alongside the other artists to standardise the customers and NPC art more - to create a coherency between them. This has also supported her efforts to create a detailed sprite sheet of all the assets we will be using for ease of access in the future.

Design Café:

Warren has focused his design efforts this week on the title screen once again, tuning the jukebox system in the menu. Right now it doesn't contain much as the game's audio is still in active development, but it lays all the framework we need to integrate it with little effort in the future. Once complete, this menu will allow you to enjoy all the music the game has to offer from the title screen.

He has also been creating a pause menu that allows you to tweak your options from within the game and not just at the title. This won't be featured in the narrative testing build, but makes it much easier to make adjustments to your game without restarting.

Writing Forge:

Kim has continued to expand the game's story, creating our first days pre-work and post-work dialogue scenes, both of which will be featured in the narrative build. These are only drafts, but will help showcase our plans for the story and the style of play.

It's been my job to convert these scripts into fungus functions in Unity engine, so my major focus has been creating all the groundwork in both phases and then integrating all of the text. There has been quite a bit of iteration on these systems as certain narrative moments were impossible with the previous setup. We expect to make more alterations through development.

Production Desk:

Over at the producers desk, Warren has stepped in to help me develop all of the necessary materials for playtesting. Playtesting is really crucial to iterate upon the game's key elements and “find the fun”. While uploading to itch for some passive testing by everyone is useful, we intend to run active tests as well where players can chat with the developers.

This means there is a lot of documentation to organise, ensuring there are sufficient questionnaires for both builds passive and active testing. This is difficult to do alone, so with Warren's help we can ensure the testing experience is as smooth as possible, allowing people to focus on the game!

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Sprint Retrospective:

Definitely did not reach our exact goal, with more machines integrated and a placeholder sprite for each character in the narrative being goals. Jakes health and the limits of productivity sadly prevented these being done - so the gameplay scene has undergone fewer changes than planned. The narrative is fully integrated in its current draft form, but Morgan and Lacy are using the same sprite for now.

Going forward, we will get better at planning out our sprints and allowing for contingencies like this. It's a matter of experience, and with every sprint we grow stronger.

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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!

Until next time, stay safe out there~

• Dan Baker, Producer and writer of Slime Cafe