September Monthly Update: Cafe size picker, trending dishes, new recipes
Hope everyone is doing well and enjoying the cooler weather! We have a couple announcements to make:
1: The full release of the game will be the next update which will be towards the end of October. 2: We're porting the game to the Switch! We're not sure yet how long this will take but we're working hard on figuring it out.
Version: 0.14EA patch notes: New Features
3 new Cafe themes are available. Seek mastery over death in the “Necromancer” theme. Go into outer space with our “Sci-fi” theme. Or, seek mastery over life with our “Nature” theme.
14 Brand new recipes! Explore a variety of new dishes that range from Japan, Australia, Britain, and the Netherlands.
Tired of being stuck in the same 5 skull cafe? Now you can change your cafe size to any of the previous cafes for even more customization. This will also set the minimum reputation level. Accessible in the pause menu in the Cafe Layouts options after beating the game (getting a 5 skull cafe).
Looks like cafe dishes are trending! Now on the menu you’ll see “trending” dishes that grant bonus reputation due to all of the food influencers.
New Reputation challenge. Try to reach the top of the leaderboard by gaining as much reputation as you can in a day.
Wanting to check the leaderboards while doing a challenge? Now you can! Access the leaderboard from the pause menu when attempting a challenge.
9 brand new Achievements that really test your mastery over your cafe. Can you serve over 1000 dishes? Can you murder over 50 customers in a single day? Try your hand at our new achievements!
Changes
Removed reputation limit. Feel free to gain as much reputation as you can.
Un-derped the Challenge icon.
Changed the layout 5 windows to be an even 3 tiles per window.
Balance Changes
Cafe theme prices have changed.
Automatic ingredient chopping speed by holding down the chopping button has been doubled.
Bugs Squashed
Fixed an issue to where you could change what furniture you’re selecting in the kitchen menu and pause menu.
The furniture selector used to draw above all other UI. Now it is in the appropriate drawing layer.
Fixed a drawing layer issue with the test kitchen minion banner drawing above the Recipe/Station cards which prevents using them.
August Monthly Update: Bugs and Polish and Quality of Life, Oh my!
In this monthly update we focused heavily on the bugs list, adding lots of small bits of polish, and adding many highly requested quality of life features. Read about all the changes below!
New Features:
No longer will you have to manually pin each undiscovered recipe while in the test-kitchen. Now while in the test-kitchen a recipes panel will be present that will allow you to scroll through all undiscovered and available recipes.
Changes:
Added a new customer aim assist. While standing on a customer you can hand them the dish you’re holding.
The fridge ingredients and the sidebar ingredients are now sorted based on type.
Changed the bean sprite.
Analog and d-pad now both work as movement input.
Fixed some German and Portuguese translations.
Numbered Challenges and organized the leaderboard.
Increased the number of save slots from 4 to 8.
Your kitchen menu will now be saved between days, and each kitchen layout has their own menu.
Added “multiplayer” option to pause menu which instructs people on how to use multiplayer.
The clock now pulses when you’re running out of time in the day.
Each Order card and customer request image now pulse when the customer is low on patience.
The kitchen menu now has skull stamps instead of checkmarks.
Added a visual indication to the summon skull to show how many souls you’ve acquired.
Customers now provide feedback when you give them the wrong dish or when you’re missing a plate.
The pause menu and hub menu are now scrollable using the furniture scroll keys.
Kitchen sound effects (oven/fryer/mixer/etc) are now muted in the pause screen.
Text is now highlighted when selected.
Furniture placement now uses an “up” icon instead of an “X” icon.
Normalized all “book” menus (recipe Book, catalog, challenge, menu).
De-summoning skeletons in mass now has an animation.
Player color and speed settings are now saved and reloadable between days.
Balance:
Ingredient capacity has increased to 999 upon unlocking the 5 skull cafe.
Bugs Squashed:
Fixed furniture cycle sound effect being played when chopping.
Fixed an issue when controlling a skeleton chef and then switching back to the player would cause the skeleton to shift position suddenly.
Fixed Chef dropping items off-grid and the items being unreachable.
Fixed being unable to interact with a chef who is on the border of a tile.
Fixed chef dribbling issue when a chef ends its routine holding something.
Fixed chef dribbling issue when a chef is programmed to chop an empty cutting board while holding an item.
You can now pickup items beneath customers.
You can now pickup items beneath a skeleton while controlling a chef skeleton.
July Monthly Update: Challenge Mode, Leaderboards, and Translations
July Monthly Update 0.10EA Patch Notes
Challenge mode now available in the hub menu, try to get the top score in 32 unique challenges, and get your name on the top score leaderboards. Also, thanks to our amazing community we now have translations for German and Brazilian Portuguese!
New Features:
Challenge modes have been implemented! Test your recipe knowledge, layout skills, and managerial experience with 32 challenges. Challenges are accessed from the hub-menu.
Leaderboards! Ever wanted to be the top chef? Well now you too can stand victorious over all others! Leaderboards keep track of the scores attained in the challenge mode, and there are two special leaderboards that track personal serve totals.
Ola! Guten Tag! Hello! Thanks to the help of our discord community we’ve now implemented translations for German and Brazilian Portuguese. They’re accessible from “options” located on the main menu.
Balance Changes:
We’ve reworked the complexity and wait time formulas for recipes. Previously they did not take into account the sub-recipes. Generally most recipes have stayed the same while others, like salad or grilled cheese, have changed.
The complexity required for skull rank 0 has been lowered from 3 to 2.
Poison stations in challenge mode are now unlimited.
Summon count in challenge mode is changed based on the number of players active.
All challenges now have trash cans and counters.
Bugs squashed:
De-summoning in mass while playing with other people will no longer mess up the summon count.
June Monthly update: Cafe save/load layouts, Cafe Stats page, new themes & more!
June monthly update Version: 0.9.997 Patch Notes
We've uploaded another update for Bone's Cafe! The biggest new feature in this update is Cafe Layouts which are save and loadable from the pause menu, you can have up to 10. You can also use this to quickly clear out the cafe of furniture and minions with the press of a button. We also fixed a pesky "phantom corpse" bug that caused corpses to sometimes be unable to be picked up.
New Features
Cafe layouts: You can now save, load and delete cafe layouts. Feel free to create Test kitchen layouts, Desert Cafe layouts, and Customer Harvesting layouts.
Statistics Page: Starting now your game will record the statistics of each dish you’ve served, each order you’ve failed, and each customer you’ve harvested.
New Cafe themes available: Regal, Strawberry and Horror cafe themes are now available in the Cafe Themes option in the pause menu.
Changes
Hints page: View the hints & tips page in the hub menu to see some helpful tips. This page has been updated to include more hints and short videos to demonstrate the hints.
Cafe themes now have different chair sprites.
Servers now get assigned tasks based on their proximity to the tasks, this makes them much more efficient.
Added a confirmation step to deleting a file to help prevent accidental file deletes.
Added playtester names to credits.
Fixed some recipes that were missing ingredients
Corpse detection has been change to make sure furniture blocks the line of sight of a corpse, but when the corpse is picked up by a player, the corpse can be detected by line of sight past furniture (because it is held up in the air above the furniture).
Bugs Squashed
Fixed phantom corpses (unable to pick up corpses).
Fixed player speed being higher while running diagonally.
Fixed steam animation on cooking stations sometimes getting reset constantly by minions.
Fixed an issue with minions and customers getting stuck on edges of furniture sometimes.
Fixed recipe book showing wrong descriptions on recipes sometimes.
Fixed a bug with the poison station sprite not updating correctly when switching cafe themes.
Fixed invisible deluxe burger combination.
Fixed a bug that prevented the player from scrolling the fridge to the right while controlling a chef.
Small update 0.9.995EA Minion server efficiency
Server minions have had their AI and pathfinding optimized to make them a bit a more efficient. Also fixed an issue with the steam animation on the fryer and grill stations.
Fix menu board page 6 freeze bug
Fixed an issue some players ran into on the kitchen menu, this happened when you had no furniture placed and scrolled to the lasagna recipe on the menu.
May Monthly update: Themes & Remappable Controls & more!
Edit: The live push earlier today around 11am PST had a bug in it, so we rolled back to the previous version then reuploaded with a fix. Just a heads up in case you played it during that time, you may have run into a few issues regarding the hub screen showing a different language than English and the play button not working or the shop screen only showing "Table and chairs" or the recipe screen only showing "Grilled Cheese Sandwich".
Once again, I want to thank our discord and steam community for helping with bug reports and feedback to improve the game. Tim and I have been working hard to make Bone's Cafe better and are excited for the next few months of updates to add more content, balances, and fixes.
The big changes in this update are the new sprite themes you can purchase from the pause menu and the remappable controls you can access from the main menu.
We've also changed some controls to make the remappable controls easier to use. It might feel a bit awkward at first if you have already gotten used to the controls.
Hoot Hoot! -Acute Owl Studio
Version: 0.9.99EA Patch Notes
New Features:
You can now purchase kitchen themes. These themes will replace the default kitchen furniture sprites with a themed set. Currently there are three themed sprite sets: 70’s Diner, Asian Cafe, and Cozy Cottage.
Key/buttons are now remappable. Ever felt frustrated at using WASD or IJL? Feel free to use whatever key/buttons you’d like to use. Access the controls remapping screen in the main menu.
Minions will now have a ‘?’ mark above their head when they’re idle for 20 seconds. This was added to allow players to visually see when a minion is idle and fix any issues that may have occurred.
Minions can now be de-summoned in mass by holding down the summon button.
Changes:
You can now hold the chop/grind key to automatically process an item.
Player speed has slowed down and the selector offset has been reduced. This should help make the controls and targeting feel a bit easier to control.
Station Cards and Recipe Cards have been re-configured to have slightly bigger sprites.
Station Cards/Recipe cards and pinned Recipes now show the premium ingredient required rather than a fridge.
The premium ingredient inventory is now displayed on top of the kitchen menu.
Chairs are now saved. They will no longer spawn back in when you reload your kitchen.
The End of Day Report text has been updated to more accurately reflect the lack of complexity on the menu.
Added a min complexity warning when starting the day.
Many recipe names and descriptions have had typo fixes.
A dialog box has been added to test kitchen mode so that players will always be aware they’re in test kitchen mode.
Added more animations to furniture sprites to make them feel more alive.
Smoke has been removed from burnt items.
Steam position has been adjusted on stations, and steam will turn to smoke when food has been burnt.
The sprite for bread has been changed to be easier to tell the difference between bread and baked potato.
Minions will now be “paused” during test kitchen mode.
Minions and furniture are no longer saved on “restart”
Balance Changes:
Corpse detection has been improved. Customers can see corpses when they are ontop of a surface (like a counter or table) or being carried by the player. They should not see the corpse if it is on the floor and behind furniture.
Bugs Squashed:
Chefs will no longer withdraw the wrong premium ingredient from the fridge inventory.
Fixed a bug that occurred when poisoned food was placed on a table and then plated resulting in the customer not being poisoned.
Chefs and servers should now face the item they’re going to interact with.
Fixed some cases of minion item “dribbling”.
Fixed money text overflow issue.
Fixed time on clock showing ":60".
Various micro bugs.
April monthly update VIP Tables and more!
Version: 0.9.92 Patch Notes
A big shout out to our community in Bone's Cafe Discord server for helping us improve the game!
New Features:
New VIP Table allows you to choose what species you want to give the VIP (Very important poisoning) treatment! The table has a display (similar to a fridge) that allows you to scroll through the list of available customers. Whatever species is selected will be attracted to the VIP table first and then regular tables. Perfect for selective butchering!
Station Cards are now available during kitchen layout mode. A station card shows up whenever a recipe is selected from the menu. The station card shows what dish you’ve selected and what stations are required for the recipe. Station cards will disappear once you’ve started cooking mode.
Skeleton Chefs and Servers are now saved between days. You no longer have to set up a chef every single day.
Changes:
You can now select recipes in the kitchen menu even if you don’t have all of the required stations for the recipe placed. You cannot start cooking until you’ve placed the required stations.
During Menu selection, you can now see what customers are attracted to each recipe.
The recipe book has now been simplified. If a recipe has a sub-recipe within it (e.g. chips in chips & Salsa) then it will no longer list the stations required for the sub-recipe.
When paused in the Test Kitchen there is no longer a ‘restart’ option.
Marinara sauce has been given a place in the recipe book. Previously only cheesy tomato soup was visible.
You now need to press a specific button on the keyboard/controller to join the game. A message displays at the start of each day in the kitchen listing the buttons required.
You can now unsummon a skeleton by selecting their summoning circle and using the summoning button.
Servers will no longer chase after a player holding a dish.
Servers now react faster after being summoned.
Lettuce has now been removed from the pizza recipe. It has been changed to a cheese pizza.
Custard now has a complexity of 0.
Fixed recipes that were missing required stations
Fixed some recipes showing chopped ingredients in the cookbook. Recipes now only show sub-recipes or raw ingredients.
The cookbook has been re-organized to introduce the player to new recipes that are simple and attract new customers. More complex recipes that use new customer ingredients are now pushed to the back of the skull rank’s section.
Customers are now focused on eating and will not notice customers around them “fainting”.
Credits have been updated to list people who have helped us out.
Balance Changes:
Basic ingredients (Non-customer drops) contribute less to the price of a dish.
Premium ingredients (Customer drops) contribute more to the price of a dish.
The complexity requirements have been increased for skull ranks 3, 4, and 5.
Reputation and Renovation costs have been increased for skull ranks 3, 4, and 5.
Skeletons now each cost 5 souls instead of 3.
The penalty for failing an order has increased to -50 reputation.
The penalty for having a corpse seen has increased to -100 reputation.
Tips have been decreased by 50%.
Bugs Squashed:
Cooking pot and mixer sounds end when the dish has finished cooking/mixing.
Customers now spawn if you have a single chair in your restaurant.
You will no longer scroll through the furniture selection while scrolling through the fridge.
Various recipes have had intermediate combinations.
Can no longer place furniture on summon circles.
Reduce chef dribbling items between hands and stations.
Fixed chefs from pulling an item out of a mixer too early.
Can no longer summon skeletons while holding an item.
Can no longer indefinitely summon a skeleton while holding an item.
Can no longer un-summon a skeleton or self-skeleton while holding an item.
Plus a lot more microscopic bugs.
Small update 4/4/22
Fix: Duplicating orders exploit. Fix: Order system would spam too many of same order some time. Fix: Sometimes server tried to serve chips & salsa to customer who ordered chips. Fix: Some missing sprites for food combinations. Polish: Added icons to menu options. Polish: Added icons to file details panel. Polish: Updated cutting board, grill, and oven sprites. Polish: Added SFX for starting test kitchen mode. Polish: Added visual fade out to final cut scene cinematic. Polish: Reordered recipes in cookbook. Balance: Made cafe 0 layout larger. Other: Added some more cheat codes.
Early access release date and development update for March
We're super excited to announce Bone's Cafe Early Access Release Date: 4/8/22!
We've gotten a lot of great feedback from the demo build posted last month and have been hard at work improving the game. The major update of note this month is a full refactoring of the minion AI code to make them much more usable, and you can summon and setup minions during kitchen setup mode. All updates listed below.
On a more personal update note, we got very unlucky this past week, first our car was broken into while we were hiking and then a few days later our dog Gimli broke his leg :( our work pace has slowed down a bit while we take care of him and help his leg bone heal and recover.
If you have any feedback to share, you can easily access us developers (Sarah and Tim) in the Bones Cafe Discord server here.
Minion AI refactored and improved.
Can summon minions during kitchen setup phase.
All customers now have a vomit animation before they die.
All customers now do a eating animation when they get their order.
Improved all story/narrative dialog.
Tweaked later game recipes to make more sense.
Reorganized the shop screen.
Added a "hints & tips" page.
Can now return items to their box (example: you can now pull out a tomato then put it back in the tomato bin.)
Made "locked" items in cookbook and catalog show slightly transparent instead of "?".
Can now use the escape key on keyboard to go back in UI menus.
Can no longer buy ingredients from fridge, but customers now drop more items when harvested.
Updated SFX, got rid of false positive sound feedback.
Customers now are attracted based on the cafe menu dishes selected.
Added "Customers" list to menu to show which customers will be attracted that day for the dishes selected.
