Slime Café Devlog - Production sprint 3

Hello everyone! Welcome to another Slime Café Development blog.

First off, We would like to apologise for no devlog last week. Some last minute bugs in our 0.7 release build resulted in 2 rapid hotfixes that consumed a fair chunk of time. We decided to prioritise that over another blog, but rest assured we will return to our usual schedule from now one!

Since we last spoke, the game has continued to expand and grow, tempered by your feedback. There are a few things we are going to keep quiet on, and some members of the team have been busy finalising other assignments - so this will be a little shorter then most Devlogs.

Anyway, enjoy!

-----------------------------------------------

Sprint 3 - Devlog - 1st March - 5th March 2021

Goal:

Our goal for the last sprint was a fully playable day - which we mostly achieved!

This sprint we wanted to really focus on refining this day, bringing a few of the suggested tweaks to the experience.

We also want to integrate a lot of foundational aspects. Our drinks machines are currently undergoing an upgrade to prepare for the addition of 2 new machines and a whole selection of new exciting drinks to go along with them.

There is a lot to prepare, and even though our next build may not seem exceptionally different - there will be plenty of foundations in place ready for a big expansion soon!

-----------------------------------------------

Progress:

Art Corner:

In the art corner, Jemma has been helping build the visuals for all of the new features coming soon. This includes the modelling of brand new ingredients, toppings and drinks in preparation for the large expansion of our in game menu coming soon.

Kathryn has been busy working on other assignments the last couple of weeks, but in between that she has also been trying to make each narrative scene look more interesting and enticing to the player. With a backdrop style chosen, she has been designing and sketching out a backdrop for the café and break-room scenes. These will give the player cute environments to enjoy while socialising with their co-workers before and after work.

Programmers Den:

Jake built a customer queue system that you saw in our last build, helping the café feel more busy and occupied. We are looking to tweak this system based on feedback, but otherwise it really works to make the café feel more populated and active.

This week he has been working on expanding our recipes, working away at building all the foundations our new drinks machines, toppings, recipe book and more. The hope is that this expansion of our core mechanics will help make the game feel more challenging and interesting, as well as offering us lots of options while balancing the multiple days the game will take place across.

Design Café:

As usual, Warrens has been hard at work in our café doing all sorts of odds and ends to help make the café feel even more vibrant. From new sound effects to briefing documents for our audio team as well as helping Jake place in some of the foundations for recipe expansion in the future, Warren has spent 1 of these past 2 weeks busy indeed!

Writing Forge:

At the world forge, I've been busy for the past couple of weeks designing, writing and tweaking the vast variety of new drinks we have planned for our game. There is still plenty to finish, but the hope is still will help create a scaling difficulty of more complex recipes. Each recipe will also offer an insight into the world and its creator, helping expand the world of Slime Café beyond its visual novel narrative scenes.

Production Desk:

Over in production, both me and Warren have been refining our playtesting process and running sessions with some of you to help understand what the player experience of the game is like. These sessions are always important for gauging players' interest in the game and picking up on bugs that are hard to identify when, as developers, we know the game innately.

As well as playtesting, me and Warren have also been preparing for our Mid Term review. This session happens once per term at our university, and is a chance for multiple tutors to see our game and our work in progress stuff. They offer feedback and also declare if the game is on track (A green light), Doing well but in need of some changes (Amber light) or needs to return to the drawing board (red light).

As this session is designed to be like a publisher update within the industry, we decided to treat it like one. Together we collated all of our work into a detailed pitch deck, which was then practiced ready for presentation. This took up a lot of our time this week, but communicating your progress in order to secure confidence in the project (and in the actual industry, funding) is a critical skill so well worth the time investment.

-----------------------------------------------

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