Last week I added more variety to guest models. But there was one addition that I didn’t manage to finish in time, which is different skin colors. I did manage to add it to this update.
Placement Hints
I reworked the hints that are displayed when you place items. They now appear whenever they are relevant instead of only after clicking while trying to place an item. I also made them look a bit more consistent.
In addition to warnings, there are now also some hints that are displayed when placing items. The rotate button is shown for example.
Added More Tooltips
Priorities
Employee randomize button
Menu stars
Speed settings
Small Changes
Fixed blackjack infinite money bug.
Reworked female sit pose.
Fixed menu requirements tooltip issue.
Fixed issue with game speed hotkeys
Fixed bug with buttons being not clickable
Improved eating animation
Fixed woman guests not having a fork.
Beard color saving fixed
Devblog 32
Character system rework
2 weeks back I added a system that gave employees different skills. With this change it became more important to be able to tell employees appart, which was not easy because they all looked identical. I spent this week reworking the character system to make the employees and guests visually more unique.
The new system should also make it much easier to add even more character variety in the future.
Female Employees
I was also able to finally add female employees.
Employee Icons
The more unique employee looks also required a new system for generating the employee icons used in UI. Previously these icons were just a static image. But the new system is much more dynamic. It also changes the icon when you change the employee's clothing.
Small Changes
Fixed Martini bug
Devblog 31
This week's update is a bit small. I hope to have a more exciting update next week.
Dirty plates indication
When a dirty plate has been dirty for a while, it will now display a particle effect. This should make it clearer when employees are taking a long time to clean tables.
Sandbox map and Trees
I changed the sandbox map and the tree’s a bit. I felt that the old colors were a bit bland.
Small Changes
Fixed texture issue in Las Vegas scenario
Rebalanced plate dropping
Review system issues fixed
City scenario hard requirement reduced from 2000 to 1250
Reduced max fast forward speed
Reduced staff salaries
Added plate dropping sound
Small Patch
Added rat traps
Made tableware cost 15 instead of 20
Devblog 30
Priorities
I mentioned in the last devblog that the game can sometimes be a bit of a waiting game, and that I wanted to make some changes to make it more interesting. After playing some older builds, I came to the conclusion that the priority system was actually quite interesting, and deemphasizing it might have been a mistake. I reverted these changes so there is now only one staff type again, and have a separate window to set their priorities.
Staff Clothes
One positive effect that introducing different staff types had, was that the different clothes made it easy to identify an employee's role. I did not want to lose this benefit so I made staff clothing an option that can be set for all employees.
Employee Stats
I also added employee stats to this update. The 3 stats that each employee has are:
Clumsiness: Clumsy employees have a higher chance of dropping plates. Cooking: Cooking skill affects food quality of the food that the employee cooks. Speed: Affects the walking speed of the employee.
Stats are randomly generated, and employees with better stats also have higher wages. I hope that the combination of the priority mechanic and the stats mechanic will lead to interesting strategies and possibilities.
Tableware Changes
I also made some changes to tableware management
Cabinets can now hold 10 instead of 7
Tableware now costs 25 instead of 5
Employees will sometimes accidentally drop and break tableware
Small Changes
Small performance improvement
Fixed land buying bug
Review popups disappear faster
Made hygiene more important
Devblog 29
Land Buying
The game can at times be a bit too much of a waiting game. After some thought, I came to the conclusion that there is no quick simple fix for this issue. My plan is to make a lot of little changes to hopefully make the game a bit more about making interesting decisions as opposed to waiting.
The first mechanic I decided to change is land buying. I often found myself having to wait until I had enough money to buy a plot of land. On top of that, the fixed plot size was very restrictive when designing a restaurant.
My solution is to revert back to how land buying was when the game was released in early access. You can now buy a single square of land again. But I also added an option to click and drag bigger plots of land.
Overlay performance
Enabling the decor overlay could cause significant lag spikes. I made some performance improvements that should hopefully resolve this issue.
Alert Messages
The alert messages were very spammy and only relevant about 50% of the time. Messages are now displayed less frequently, and are hopefully a bit more helpful and relevant.
Small Changes
Slightly changed post processing
Rebalanced research tree
Improved menu happiness for tables with modified dish availability
Modified reviews to be more useful
Change Route 66 scenario balance
Added a hint to the decor overlay button when decor is bad
Small Patch
Fixed tooltip size inconsistencies
Fixed tooltips sometimes not showing up
Fixed dishwasher tooltip being enabled through UI
Fixed tooltips remaining while window is closed
Devblog 28
This week I focussed on making TasteMaker more fun and easy to learn. I feel that the current tutorial is boring and does not do a good job at explaining all the mechanics. My plan is to completely remove the tutorial and incorporate it into the game.
Tooltips
Some UI elements will now show additional information when you hover your mouse over them. Creating this system took up most of my time this week because I wanted to make it as dynamic as possible, and because I ran into some technical issues. In the end I think that it was worth it because I can now add a new tooltip extremely fast. The system probably still needs some polishing and tweaking but I am quite happy with it.
Blocking Button
I also implemented a system that hides buttons and UI elements that are not relevant at that moment. The tutorial already had something like this, but I improved it and made it work across the entire game.
Small Changes
When a scenario’s challenge is finished, it will now be marked as such.
Small performance improvements
Lowered required profit for the Route 66 Hard challenge for 1000 to 750
Fixed ingredients sometimes not resetting upon delivery
Fixed some issues with the intro
Small Patch
Added a feature that adjusts prices of old builds automatically to work with the new game balance.
Devblog 27
This week's update is unfortunately not that exciting. I spent a large portion of the week testing the game, and I worked on some features that are not quite ready yet. But my aim is to release an update every week, and I’m excited to share the things I did manage to finish.
Balance change
Due to the changes I've made to the menu system last week, the ability to grow your restaurant's profit has become very important. However, There were some big balancing issues that made this very hard.
The issue was that staff salaries were high, and as your restaurant grew, the salaries would increase very quickly. The effect of this was that the restaurant's income would go up, but the profit would stay the same or decrease.
This update contains some balance changes to fight this issue. I have significantly reduced staff salaries, and reduced the food prices to compensate for this. The profits should now scale a lot better. I also rebalanced the research tree.
Ingredient ordering change
I made a small but important tweak to the ingredient system. You now don’t have to pay for ingredients that don’t fit in storage. I think that the ingredient management system is flawed, and punishing the player for not managing ingredients properly feels a bit unfair. I hope that I can improve the ingredient system in the future, and make it a bit more challenging again.
Small Changes
Reworked the opening intro
Fixed a bug when moving items between floors
Fixed workload message bug
Kitchen equipment that can't be used yet is now greyed out
Fixed warning messages continueing in pause
Decreased delivery from 80 to 63 seconds
Fixed money overlap when deleting table with item on it.
