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[TheSociopathSoftware]

UPDATE: CoffeeBiz is in Early Access now on Steam

Overview

CoffeeBiz tycoon is a mix of entrepreneurship fun and complicated business simulation. Start your first coffee kiosk, brew, expand, hire, deal with competitors, build a well-known brand, risk, and do everything else needed to build a prosperous and profitable business. Created in isometric pixel art graphic style by a single developer. This game is not another ‘click and wait’ kind of game. Its deep and detailed business simulation game with ‘hard to win, easy to get bankrupt’ concept in its core.





Features

• Pixel-perfect 2.5D graphics with dynamic lighting
• Two game modes: sandbox and scenarios
• Different locations to explore and decide where is the best location to run business
• Kiosk to brew coffee and sell it to customers. Buy ingredients, place coffee machine and barista, set prices, promote and make money
• Four customer types with different needs and demand to analyze
• Employees to hire, fire, motivate and educate. Assign them to the barista, assistant or managers positions. Watch for their energy and mood
• Equipment (like coffee machines) to research, buy, service and repair to keep coffee quality and brew speed at high levels
• Random events like employee illness, vandalism, and other that will affect your operations and sales
• Office with the manager to organize and improve business operations and research new business opportunities
• Detailed finance simulation
• Unlimited amount of business strategies to try out

Developer
Sociopathsoftware is an independent game development studio consisting out of a single developer doing all the game design, coding, and artwork. Currently focused on creating business simulation games for PC.

Key links
Official Game Website: http://thesociopath.software/coffeebiz/
Steam: store.steampowered.com/app/674370/CoffeeBiz

[AdamAlake]

The art looks great and I love me some coffee so I am following this.

[TheSociopathSoftware]

Thanks!

Some backstory, how 2d-3d graphics works. The game is created in Unity3d, so I'll use unity engine based terminology. The first idea was just to make an isometric 3d camera and pixel-art textures. But it was a total fail. All modern 3d graphics are full of anti-aliasing, texture filtering, and float values. Textures were blurry, edges not sharp at all. Dynamic objects were like from other game (like cars and trains in SimCity4). I found it impossible to keep a razor-sharp pixel-art style in full 3d. So nowadays its combination of 4 different layers - 2d interface, 2d game, 3d isometric for shadows and other 3d for dynamic objects (mostly vertex-lit). Perhaps one more layer for normal mapping is coming. Animation, explaining it:

Step 1: Hand-drawn isometric object. Filter mode - point, no texture compression.
Step 2: 3D mesh of the same shape, so it fits drawn sprite pixel-perfect
Step 3: No cascades for shadows, for sharp look
Step 4: Combined

As a final result, I am trying to achieve, so when you pause a game, you get a feeling, that there is no 3d at all, and lighting and shadows are drawn, not rendered.

Plans:
 - Normal mapping for small details? - not sure about it, first experiments were not so good, but I am going to give it another chance
 - Dusk-dawn color change
 - Night mode

[ionside]

wow!This looks pretty intense, art-wise and game-play. I like the idea of using 3d objects as mattes, for the lighting.

[litHermit]

Love the style you accomplished with this, would love to see more interesting lightning (dusk/dawn/night)

[TheSociopathSoftware]

Hi there! It's been a while since my last post on CoffeeBiz tycoon. But when you are making the indie game all by yourself, plans can be interrupted in many ways. Anyway, now it's my #1 priority project, so new functions, builds and devlog posts will be coming more often.

And you can already download and play in first public version, but notice its prototype build to check some base ideas and functions. Check it out at thesociopathsoftware.itch.io/coffeebiz

[TheSociopathSoftware]

Video timelapse, how 2.5d assets for the game are made. It's about 0.5-1h for an element like a kiosk in this video.

[TheSociopathSoftware]

This week I've been working on some interface design changes. Trying to make it clean, nice and functional. As an examle screnshots of coffeemachines tables progress.

Oldest variant


Previous


Current

[TheSociopathSoftware]

Meanwhile first trailer are ready and published. Check it out!

[cykboy]

i like how you are approaching the isometric shadows. i was able to achieve a very similar thing in an older project, but that was using voxels and some clever raycasting techniques to convert those voxels into 1:1 iso pixel art at 60fps/1080p.

the art itself could use a bit of touching up, i love the humans but some environments feel a bit lacking. that being said, a great start to the project. will be following this 

[Devilkay]

when the 3D meets the pixel art!

[TheSociopathSoftware]

i like how you are approaching the isometric shadows. i was able to achieve a very similar thing in an older project, but that was using voxels and some clever raycasting techniques to convert those voxels into 1:1 iso pixel art at 60fps/1080p.

the art itself could use a bit of touching up, i love the humans but some environments feel a bit lacking. that being said, a great start to the project. will be following this 

Thanks, I'll post more info about technics used to make such graphics in Unity. Also here a screenshot with some night lighting experiments.

[TheSociopathSoftware]

Refactoring customers AI and implementing fast pathfinding so it can handle x4-x8 game speed modes.
Pathfinding is "A* Pathfinding Project" - very nice library, first time I don't want to rewrite all code by myself, so it works in a game the way I want to.

[TheSociopathSoftware]

Devlog #1 - Marketing

The base concept of this game – sophisticated and realistic business simulation. And marketing is one of the most complicated modules of CoffeeBiz. In upcoming Alpha 1.2 marketing are getting a huge update and in this devlog, I’ll try to describe how it will work.

Basics
Base element and point of sales are a coffee kiosk; it has three base parameters – visibility, attraction, and popularity. And if everything is done correctly, clients will decide to buy coffee and spend their money at your kiosk. More satisfied customers, more sales, more money. But there are different customers with different needs, different locations with different challenges and competitors, who also want to sell their coffee. I want to make marketing module work in such a way, so there can’t be a single most effective working marketing strategy, and the player must always adapt to market and new situations.

Customers
Customers walk, notice kiosks and decide where to buy a coffee. Customer starts looking around for coffee kiosks to serve his demand. He will compare all visible kiosks and know kiosks, even if they are far away. After making a list of potential kiosks, customer compares their attraction value and goes for coffee to highest offer. At the kiosk, he checks out current kiosk clearness, line length, chosen recipe availability, prices. Only if satisfied with all these factors, he will order coffee. Otherwise, he will leave.



Each customer type has its demands preference. For example, a student almost doesn’t care about kiosk clearness and service time are critical for office workers. Right now its only 4 type of customers, but new updates will bring new locations with new customer types to investigate.

After coffee brewed, the customer pays and evaluate its taste (0-100), customer service bonus and kiosk clearness bonus. Based on that total satisfaction are calculated. But that’s not all. Coffee can be awful, service low and kiosk extra dirty. But if you pay for it only 1$ - it’s become a good deal. So customer resulting opinion of the kiosk is based on satisfaction/price table. For example, full students chart below.



The chart is filled gradually, and the full chart is visible only after hundreds of sales. Notice that only barista with >1 service level can catch information about customer type – higher service level, higher chances. Increase the barista service level, brew lots of coffee and you will learn how to deal with each type of customers. Also, the barista service level increases chances to sell extras – toppings, drinks, and snacks.

Promotion
The well-known kiosk can get much more customers because customers will evaluate it at any position on location. Especially if there are no competitors. Some popularity kiosk is getting from client – after buying a coffee, even unsatisfied, he will remember kiosk. Also, some percent of passing by clients can notice and remember kiosk, even if they not ordering any coffee. Same way the outdoor advertisement works – its adds some popularity to kiosks and can force the customer decides to buy coffee immediately. Another way to get some popularity – pay for an advertising agency. To monitor clients, who know about kiosk and who don’t - in kiosk marketing tab “highlight clients” can be clicked.



Some features in development (coming in Alpha 2-3).

• Branding – create and promote brands specialized in different marketing strategies
• Marketing guidelines – create advertisement guidelines to improve outdoor advertising
• Custom menu – create specialized menus with accents on some recipes or extras
• New adv types - a man in costumes, draw on the floor

[TheSociopathSoftware]

A short video showing how pixel-art 2.5D graphics with dynamic shadows works in CoffeeBiz Tycoon

[TheSociopathSoftware]

Alpha 2.1 released!

Key new feature - timetables.

[TheSociopathSoftware]

Working on some details for the first district

[TheSociopathSoftware]

Alpha 2.2 is Live!
While I am working on a big Alpha3 update, a minor update for Alpha2. More details about game development plans and roadmap to full release in upcoming devlog.

Improvements and Changes
- New event – worker boost
- Hi-level workers resume search
- Assistants 3d models added to kiosks
- Promoter cup costume for assistant
- Locations new objects and details
- Lot work-in-progress visuals added
- Different kiosks place on the lot time now showed in the kiosk shop panel
- M size kiosk graphics update
- Bank loans available only after company incorporation

Bugfixes
- Second assistant kiosk panel operation fixed
- Locations 2d-3d graphical bug fixes
- Kiosk client attractiveness data of not placed kiosk fixed

[TheSociopathSoftware]

Fully reworking UI – making it lighter and more intuitive.

[TheSociopathSoftware]

The development of CoffeeBiz Tycoon continues, and I have many things planned to implement. New features, game mechanics, and the content will come in new updates. To summarize and organize it all here is first Roadmap (now just as a list) of previous and upcoming updates. It’s important to say that roadmap is subject to change depending on players feedback and game development process.

Alpha 1 (Early Access Launch) – October 2018

• Core game mechanics

Alpha 2 – March 2019

• New locations
• Updated marketing and workers modules
• Office and management
• Branched saves
• Adjustable difficulty
• Workers time shifts
• New coffee machines

Alpha 3 – May 2019

• UI update
• New ingredients system – ingredients quality, shelf life, bulk purchase, and weekday-weekend purchase planning.
• Distinct managers – assign a manager to take control of kiosks and workers operations marketing to increase its performance and get access to new operations over it.
• Competitors pressure – disturb competitors, sabotage their kiosk business operations to get an advantage.
• Events that require reaction decide on how to perform in such situations as worker absenteeism, competitor sabotage, and other business disturbing situations.
• Research tree
• Missions – accomplish missions from locals and authorities to earn money, reputation, and other bonuses.

Further – Alpha 4,5,6…

• Custom scenarios mode
• Sandbox mode
• New locations
• XS, L, XL kiosk sizes
• Custom coffee kiosks
• Vending coffee machines
• Custom coffee recipes
• Workers perks
• Multi-language support
• Mods support
• Branding
• Weeklong events
• New kiosk, coffee machines, office equipment

Release – Q4 2019.
Its very estimated date, but I don’t think that more than one-year Early Access is good for the game or players.