Dev Blog 21 | Jel's Cafe | Bug fixes, Bliss and other bits and bobs

Hi everyone, its Friday so its time for another weekley blog post about my game development. I'm still working hard on the project, and I have several new bits of info to talk about today! Lets dive into it!

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JEL'S CAFE PROGRESS

Writing work:

The script of the game is still currently being written out in a document. This process takes time as I have to manualy copy and paste each line directly from RPGMAKER. Once I've finished the placeholder script me and a friend will then review all of it, making changes, suggestions, ideas all sorts. This process will be in the works for a long while, but should prove in the long term to be a good idea.

Bliss:

Bliss got some changes for the next build. Firstly, she is starting to have her completed artwork added to the game, I'm still hard at work on the remaining sprites but as of now, Bliss' weight stages 1 - 4 have been completed. Every single character is planned to have 8 stages from skinny to barely mobile, with a 9th stage being a unique "Ending" image. I plan on trying to include all 8 of Bliss' art to the game for the next build, the Ending image however won't be added till much later on.

In addition to this new art, Bliss also had an update to the "I need money" option that can be found in her help section. For playtesting reasons in the last builds she would give the player $150 every time you chose that option. This system has now been reworked and is fully implemented. Bliss will now instead offer to give you the money that she would normally give you at the end of a shift early. This can be done once a day and the amount she gives you scales with her Friendship stat, just like the other staff members. If Bliss does give you payment early then she will not give you money alongside Jel and Bliss. This system is to be used in case the player has no money to buy food items from Jel, or the player is in need of a quick top up to buy a gift item.

Quota update:

The Quota system was added fairly recently, and still had some issues to iron out. One major issue I realised that was unintentional was the Quota not actually progressing past week 1. This was a complete accident, so now going forward the player should now be able to reach up to Quota/Week 7 before the game loops Week 7 over and over (Which is intentional for now). There is currently no reward for reaching this, and I might possibly look at tying an ending to reaching it, if any playtester does reach this then you have my huge thanks!

Bug Fixes and Clean ups:

This week I sat down and playtested the game. I found a number of bugs that have now been squashed except for one that I'll talk about first.

While playtesting I ran into an unusual and rare bug where for some reason customers on specifically table 2 do not spawn, Table 1 3 and 4 are unaffected. I have no idea if this game has been in the game since the first build or if it just appeared in this new build, but whatever is causing this I currently have no fix for it, everything in the code appears fine and I'm left stumped. A minor solution I added is now if this rare bug is to occur, the player can instead now find free money on the table with the interaction "Seems whoever was here was in a hurry. They left behind $15!" This now turns what was a possibly game breaking bug into a rare event/easter egg. If I had a real solution to fixing this then I would simply do that rather than adding this event, but it is what it is!

Other than that, heres the list of bugs or cleanup changes that were squashed from my playtest:

- Removed Unused option from Phoebe "Customer info" as this purpose was reworked into the logbook.

- Fixed some clunky menu attributes in "Chum"s menus.

- Extended the trigger for the Punch Clock in the Cafe's hallway. (This means its bigger and now easier to interact with).

- Added a failsafe for a rare bug (That I can't figure out how to fix) where a second customer fails to load. (The player can instead obtain a free $15 by interacting with the table).

- Fixed missing flags that would progress Quota mode past the 1st week.

Thats it for now! I'll keep at the hard work and will have more to share next week! Thank you all for your continued support!