Slime Café Devlog - Production Sprint 2

Greetings and welcome to another Slime Café development blog. With our second sprint of the term half way done, the game continues to grow ever bigger!

Team health has hit a low this week, so we definitely haven't achieved everything we want, but we have still continued to make strides.

We hope you have all been enjoying the two builds we posted at the start of this week! Based on some of the feedback we have gained so far, we have already begun implementing improvements and changes alongside new content.

One final note before we launch into development talk, some of you provided an email address as contact earlier in development - Its unfortunate but we will no longer be using these to contact you regularly. Development is busy in the production phase and we are a small team, so decided to shift our focus to delivering high quality content over yet another channel of communication. Rest assured if you did provide your email - It is still completely secure and will not be shared.

Anyway, with that over and done with, enjoy!

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Sprint 2 - Devlog - 15th February 2021 - 19th February 2021

Goal:

Our goal this sprint was to achieve a fully playable day, with a flow from narrative to gameplay and back to narrative without the need for multiple builds. In addition, we wanted to add each scene with new art to help make a vibrant world, as well as accompany the narrative delivery.

Progress toward this is coming along. While some cuts have had to be made due to the current health issues certain members faced, a clean transition between the phases is within clear view.

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Progress:

Art Corner:

Over in the art department, Kathryn has been helping build the narrative scenes up. Right now, each scene is only using pre-existing textures or materials to act as backdrops, Kathryn has been working to convert these into bespoke and detailed 2d backgrounds to help deliver the narrative.

This week in particular, she has been developing 2 distinct styles for the cafe background. Both accompany the visual style narrative, but by creating multiple styles it gives us a chance to offer useful feedback and changes. From here, she can continue to develop the rest of the backgrounds in this same style, ensuring a coherent and consistent appearance to each area.

Jemma on the other hand has been focusing her efforts on the tasty drinks you will encounter. She has been creating new textures for all of the various slime juices - which will act as the base ingredient for every drink in the game. Our previous builds have only showcased the 3 basic ones, but more complex recipes will require you to merge them together into all kinds of different flavours!

Spending plenty of time to ensure these textures are engaging is really important. Not only do they accelerate the rate at which a player can absorb information about the item, based on its colour, visual style and even animation, but it also aids how accessible our game is. Those who have color blindness or other visual impairments may struggle to identify each drink on colour alone, so by ensuring a clear visual style and animation, each drink becomes much more distinct.

Design Café:

Warren has continued to focus his efforts on the experience of the player in our world via the audio. Working to find us new and exciting sound effects to be incorporated into the game, he is ensuring that the player will not only feel immersed, but also receive plenty of feedback on their actions.

He has also integrated the brand new title theme composed by our audio freelancers, as well as expanding our options menu to accommodate this new music.

Writing Forge:

Kim’s focus this sprint has been refinement over creation. In our latest playtest, we asked how important the player felt to the narrative and how embodied you felt as an active character. The feedback was illuminating, making it very clear the distinctions between characters needs improvement.

To this end, Kim has been going through our existing story scripts and making small tweaks and changes to help deliver a clearer narrative. This has also been a good chance to reflect on the story we are telling.

On the other side, I've been working on making our drinks menu more diverse and interesting. I have designed several new recipes for our existing flavours, adding fun flavour text to help you learn more about the world alongside them. I have also been working on some of the compound recipes, creating 3 new drinks for our crystal slime flavouring that is coming soon!

This gives us lots more interesting drinks for you to experiment with and make, as well as offering a chance to gain an insight into the game world and its characters through flavour text.

Audio Shed:

While Warren has been hard at work finding and adding new sound effects to the world, the task of composing entirely original musical pieces for our game falls to our two freelancers - Josh and Dom!

This week, Josh has put the last tweaks on the title theme song, adding a friendly and exciting backing track to the main screen of our game. The theme, as well as all the in progress music they are working on for us, is the product of plenty of iteration. Having 2 audio creators means they can collaborate and feedback off each other, as well as receiving feedback from the team itself.

Go and check it out on YouTube:

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Sprint Retrospective:

Looking back at the week so far, we start the next week with a review of our progress.

We have had to cut some features in order to fit the new scope, our lower productivity limiting our output. This productivity drop is due to unavoidable health complications among certain team members, so there is no source of blame.

The key place we tuned down was the drink making process, while the existing drinks remain unchanged - some of the more complex recipes planned have been simplified. This reduces the strain on the programming side and allows the focus to be on key mechanics instead.

Another short-term way we've scaled down is narrative backdrops. No backdrops have been completely cut, but some have been shifted to another sprint - and the existing narrative has been tweaked to accommodate a smaller amount of backdrops for this sprint.

Keep an eye out next week as another playtest is due, this time looking for feedback on the full and complete gameplay loop.

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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 Café