Cascade Cafe
Hotfix 2022.6.18.3
Update #16
So today's update fixes the following areas:
Improvements
Added a "Restart Level" button to the menu
Pretty self explanatory - there's now the ability to restart a level without having to go back to the main menu. I'm not sure why that didn't occur to me to add this in before.
Tooltips for items and stage gimmicks
You can now hover over items and stage gimmicks during the match and you will get the tooltip information. Another one of those 'seems so obvious in retrospect" features that I totally missed!
Block Rotation Reminder
It's funny that Dohi64 mentions in the review that, initially, they forgot you can rotate tiles. The #1 playtest feedback I got from people was that it took them a while to remember they could rotate tiles too. At the time I figured "well that's just because the tutorial still needs some work", but it's still an issue that comes up!
I've now added an alert that popus up on the first real match reminding you that you can rotate tiles, if you've not rotated a tile in the first 20 seconds of the game. I should have listened closer to playtesters - lesson learned!
I think the wording could still be improved. I want to note that you can rotate the tile, but only the active tile you played this turn (I don't want someone to click a tile played on a previous turn and be confused why it doesn't rotate, and think they misunderstood the tutorial). I'll probably come back to this and play with the wording.
Bug Fixes
Selected Abilities not being used in level
When selecting your abilities in the stage select book, those abilities were reset to the three first abilities when you enter the match. This has been fixed so that it now retains your selection. When I added the puzzle mode in, I added some code to reset the game settings, but that was overriding the abilities you had selected.
Lots of typos in the story fixed
It's probably still not perfect, but I fixed a bunch of typos in the story. I also updated the wording of most of the items and gimmick tiles in the game. I had originally tried to make the sentences as short as possible to reduce reading time, but going back and reading them again now the sentences just feel like they are poorly worded. I've updated them to sound more like natural sentences.
Added a "Return to Stage Select" button back to the menu
You can also now go straight back to the stage select screen rather than all the way to the main menu. This button used to exist, but when I redid the UI with the new styles, I accidentally dropped this button off the menu and didn't notice.
Mouse Cursor Hotspot fixed
I didn't notice this until now, but I reset the mouse cursor hotspot at some point, so when clicking on screen it was actually off by about 9 pixels. This was kind of annoying when trying to click smaller elements on the screen. This has now been fixed.
What's Next
Big thanks to Dohi64 for such a thorough review! If you are interested in their game coverage, check out their reviews here or check out the Puzzle Lovers page for more.
Update #15
One of the tricky parts of being a part time dev is that you only get to work on the game part time. With work ramping up near the end of the year I've not had as much time to work on the game as I liked.
On the plus side I was able to get some patches out for the game (so they've actually been live for a few weeks now) but I'm only just not getting around to the update.
Freezing Game Fix
One of the bugs that I've been trying to track down for a long time is when the game randomly freezes when playing against the CPU. Locally I almost never got the issue, but I did get a number of people sending screenshots using the in game feedback tool. Plus Magerama left a review mentioning the freezes as well.
I was finally able to track down what the cause was. It turns out that it was the timing of animations when using abilities. You see, the game processes abilities and items as code that runs exactly the same for the human player, the CPU or for offline/online. When you use an ability or an item it plays out some animations, and then once it's done tells the CPU player it's ready for it to take its turn. It seemed there was a bug that affected nearly all the abilities and items where the CPU would start playing it's turn before the animations had actually completed - this caused the scene to start to get out of sync turn over turn. What was especially tricky about the bug is that you don't notice it right away, it's only once several of these animations have been cut off and the scene drifts further out of sync that the game runs the risk of freezing.
Hopefully this resolves this issue and the game should be much more stable.
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I've also added some extra puzzles. I'll be spending a bit more time adding in some more puzzles over the next few weeks, trying to get that number up a bit. I added a new one for this update. They are surprisingly hard to make - I originally thought they would be a lot quicker, but it takes a lot of trial and error to figure out some good challenges. I think I need to come up with a better way of making them, haha. But yeah the next update should have a bunch more.
That's it for now, a bit of a small update!
Hotfix 2021.10.16.3
+ Fixed "Thunderstorm" ability using wrong targeting type (previously you could not target your own tiles, despite the description claiming you could).
+ Fixed "Woodworkers Hammer" ability causing the level data to get out of sync with the visuals.
Note: To apply some of these fixes, the game engine had to update to the latest version, which may cause other unforeseen bugs. If you see any strange issues, either use the in-game feedback tool, post on the forums or send me a message on Discord. Thanks!
Update #14
Cascade Cafe is fully released!
It's taken a huge amount of work to get here. This is the first game I've released on Steam (I've made lots of web based games, but never a full PC game), and the amount of work it takes to get to a full release is so much more than it seems. It's amazing how fast you get the core loop of the game done, then spend most of your time building screens, save systems, trying to come up with consistent UI/UX. I could probably write a hundred blog posts on what I've learned about running a long term project in Unity.
Here's some fun stats:
- Years of Development: 2.5
- Unity Version Upgrades: 5
- Number of full art replacements: 2
- Number of theme overhauls: 3
- Number of full code rebuilds: 4 - I think? I did 2 prototypes, then started a real version, which later I rebuilt a second time which is the version today.
- Coffees Drank: 2000'ish?
- Number of tweets about the game: 49. I'm bad at twitter.
Also,
Huge thanks to Sol Azpiroz for doing the artwork!
Huge thanks to Purrple Cat for the music!
This game wouldn't look or sound like it does without them!
What's Next
This isn't the end of the development of Cascade Cafe. Some new things I want to work are:
1. Look into a Nintendo Switch version. I have access to a developer account - I just need to figure out how the controls are going to work. I think this game could work really well with the touch screen.
2. More puzzles. At the moment there's about 10 puzzles in the game, but I want to get that up to at least 30. They take a surprising amount of time to make.
3. Bonus levels. I'd like to make some extra levels you unlock by playing through story mode, or by completing story mode.
4. Localization: At the moment the game is English only. Turns out localization of text gets expensive really fast, so I'm going to see how the game does and try to funnel the games sales into saving up for getting it localized. I've had some offers from some really nice people to help out with this task.
That's it for now - go buy the game! :D
Or wishlist it, that's cool too.
yay :)