Dev Blog 28 | Jel's Cafe | Pre rush and "Story" mode

Hey everyone, it's Friday so its time for another progress report. Yesterday my drawing tablet officially kicked the bucket after showing signs of starting to not wanting to cooprotate for the past few months it. I've ordered a new one, it has cost me an arm and a leg and basically left me with nothing left. As soon as the new tablet arrives development for this game will be put on pause to open for emergency commissions to get enough to pay off the tablet but then also bills for July too. Thankfully whilst I wait for the tablet I am still able to work on pixel art stuff for the game, I mostly do that with a mouse so I can still chip away at anything non character related.

Pain and suffering aside, this week I had a heavy focus on updating the very start of the game. Heres everything I did:

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JEL'S CAFE PROGRESS

Pre rush:

The Pre rush section of the game has been receiving a much needed update. Prior to this week it was a simple interaction screen where you could talk to Bliss, Jel and Phoebe as well as edit the Customer Log book too, all of the characters interactions in this section were incredibly outdated with mechanics that were planned very early on that got changed or cut.

Now the Pre Rush section of the game is similar to the End of Shift section of the game, you can walk around the Cafe, talk to the staff who all have some new interactions, still edit the logbook and now also have the option to change the Cafe's theme too. (Bliss uses her cool demon magic to swap the themes around in an instant). You can interact with the Punch Clock to start the day and move onto the 1st Rush.

Intro:

You might've seen in the discord server a new design for my self insert/sona Holly. She's got a slightly new look to her, and because of that she has had her sprites updated at the very start of the game, during the mysterious black room void section. This was partially done because the old frog sprites were slightly off, and also were drawn in a different way to the rest of the games sprites, for consistency the new sprites were drawn the same as the rest of the games art, meaning it no longer has weirdly thick lines anymore.

"Story" mode:

"Story" mode is basically just "Quota" mode but renamed. From what I could tell from most playtester feedback, most people simply didn't play Quota mode. To make it more enticing in the future, it'll be renamed to "Story mode" and will have even more exclusive content attached to it, with casual mode being the much simpler "I don't care about the story I just wana make people fat" cycle.

To go along with the renaming of the mode, more playable spaces and interactions have been added to the game. I've still got some work to do with it, but right now once you complete the tutorial shift the player visits Frankie's office (The guy you pay your quota too), it's got a really nice look to it all so far and I'm really happy with how its all turning out. I'm doing a test if you're actually reading this blog post please comment "Radical Slime", thank you. The player can talk to Frankie who'll give a full breakdown of how the Quota system works, and then the player can interact with him some more or with stuff in his office. This playable space will make returns at the end of the week when Quota is due, though like I said this part isn't ready yet.

A new change I also plan on making is that if you fail a Story mode playthough, as in you can't meet the quota, the player now has an option to continue their playthrough in casual mode instead, that way you keep all of the progress without having to restart from scratch, but you will get locked out of reaching the planned ending that will be obtainable after 7 quota weeks.

Theres a few other suprises I've added in this new story mode area of the game so I won't spoil it here! Once the new build is ready I'll hope you'll all check it out!

Character fading:

This is something I wish I discovered whilst I was working on Drawing with Nat. In that game when you talk to characters their sprites appear on screen by fading in. The way I got this to work was by manually setting the sprite to different oppacity's one by one, as you can imagine this took forever and wasn't very optimal.

I wasn't going to do this for Jel's Cafe as almost all of the game uses multiple different character sprites so this process would've actually taken almost tripple the amount of time. THANKFULLY I found a new method of doing this which is 10x easier, and I really wish I found it out beforehand. What this means now is talking to characters will have their sprites fade in nicely instead of abrubtly spawning infront of you. I still have to fully add this to every character, but the process itself thankfully isn't very hard, just a lil teidous as I need to update everything. But overall its a good change!

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That's everything for now, I'll still continue working on what I can whilst I wait for the new tablet, and then as I said, once the tablet arrives I'll be pausing development to fully focus on any commissions I get.

Thank you for reading!