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Project Cappuccino - Development Road Map - 2018
🕑 Added 2018-04-06 16:20:30 +0000 UTC Hey everyone! We’ve put together some information about the vision we have for Project Cappuccino and what we plan on doing this year to achieve it. As work continues, we’ll be posting one of these road maps every 6 months or so, depending on what we see fit. The game has come a long way since it was first introduced back in November 2017. The spirit of it remains strong and we never imagined it would grow like this.Project Cappuccino began development in May 2017. Due to our jobs interfering with production, the initial public build took us about 6 months to produce, however I would say that only 2-3 of those months were spent doing dedicated Project Cappuccino work. At the time, it was simply a hobby that Dokucchi and I were devoting our free time to. When we released our demo, we never expected the level of support that we’ve had and we sincerely thank you as we are now in the early steps of dedicating ourselves to turning this into a career.
With the sentimental stuff out of the way, it’s time to talk about the juicy stuff. A lot of our original game design has been improved based on your feedback and we’ll try to cover as much as possible.
Upcoming Features
Undressing Characters Before Encounters
While CG’s of characters taking their clothes off can be nice, we’ve decided to take it up a notch and allow the players to undress characters themselves. We’ve spoken a bit about this feature in one of our past update logs but here is what we’ve got in mind.
When encountering a character, players will be given the option of taking off pieces of clothing one at a time. Selecting a piece of clothing to take off will then trigger the appropriate CG of the character undressing before returning you to the initial undressing scene. The character at this point will be missing the selected piece of clothing and this will continue until they’re completely nude or the player decides to skip it.
This feature will have subtle animations while the character waits for you to tell them what to take off. Things like breathing, blinking, arm and leg movements, etc. It will also vary depending on which room you decide to use in the future. It's also the reason that Colette doesn't have undressing CG's the same way that Sophie does. We would like to have this system in place before creating the CG's to go along with it.
Character Sprite Upgrades
There’s a few things that we would like to improve when it comes to character dialogue sprites. Primarily that they always have the same pose regardless of expression. While it would be a rather straightforward process to implement different sprite poses, it will prove to be a bit time consuming for Doku. This addition will be added to one of our Patreon milestones while we work on higher priority game content. Having a character move their arms when surprised or cross them when angry would allow us to convey a little more emotion through them. We’re confident that we will be able to add this improvement to the game so we’ll set some time apart in our workflow once the game is a little more complete.
Gallery System
The gallery has been on our to do list since day one. This feature is heavily dependent on CG’s being completed and having Art to include in it in the first place. While the design of it isn’t finalized, we’re thinking of having the option to blow up images to their maximum size within the gallery and pan across them. Most of the artwork that Doku creates is in huge resolutions and being able to see them that size in game would be awesome. More info on this feature will be available once we’re able to draft up some concept art for the UI.
In the meantime, we will be collecting artwork for this feature from the following places.
- In game CG’s
- Monthly Patron Voted Artwork Polls
- Cappuccino Tier Patron Artwork Requests
Second NSFW Room
*Section Omitted due to adult content, Room 2 has been implemented in v1.6.0*
Addition of New Maid, Cerise
Some of you have already seen a glimpse at Cerise, our upcoming maid, in some of the live streams that have taken place. She’s also made a small appearance in an art package a few months back, but we’ve got some more info on what we plan to do with her.
With Chapter 2 completed, we expect to be introducing Cerise into the story in Chapter 3. We don’t want to plug her into the game just yet until her character is revealed through the story route as we would like for you guys to really experience who she is before jumping right into bed with her.
Cerise is Sophie’s childhood friend that may or may not have had an insane crush on Sophie. (Without Sophie catching on of course.) In terms of personality, she’s incredibly timid, yet tends to be skilled at nearly anything she tries. Things like accidentally solving a rubix cube or mastering a complicated recipe on the first try. There’s a few plot secrets related to Cerise that we aren’t revealing yet, but all I can say is that she’s going to bring a little magic to the Resting Bean Cafe.
We’re also scheduling a live stream for April 21st, where we’ll be streaming her design process! We’ll be making a post when that date draws closer as a reminder.
Revamp of Work Assignment System
The work assignment system is admittedly one of our weakest points at the moment. We’ve been brainstorming a mini game in which you actually perform the work day itself. The goal is to earn as much money as possible by assigning characters to one of the three stations. (Waitress, Barista and Cleaning). Their daily performance will be affected by factors such as stress level, work pace and points that have been assigned. You will then be tasked with responding to their tasks as they come up. For example: There’s a spill that Colette must clean up, the player must click the spill and have her clean it while simultaneously taking care of Sophie’s tasks.
Seeing as this feature is a general improvement to the game, we’re going to place it as a Patreon goal while we handle other game components such as the story and nsfw encounters.
New Reward Tiers/Restructure & Goal Revamp
Recently the Cappuccino tier has filled up in just this past month. We're in awe and super thankful for it! To be honest, we were expecting this tier to grow slowly so we could test the waters with it, so now we're having a bit of a problem.
We want for more people to be able to request artwork, but that would add too much workload on Doku, since the art pieces can be extremely time consuming. We’re estimating each piece to take around a day and a half, so we're already at around 6-9 days of work from this tier alone. With more requests, you can see how this would take too much time away from the regular game artwork like character sprites, animations, items, GUI, backgrounds and CGs.
While the current tier size is manageable, we don't think keeping or expanding this tier as it is will be feasible in the long run.
So, after a bit of planning, we’ve decided to do a bit of restructuring and add 2 new reward tiers to the mix.
MACCHIATO TIER ($15)
This tier is one step above Espresso but right under Cappuccino. With this option, patrons will be able to contribute a random work day interaction to the game. As long as the dialogue makes sense in the story context and isn’t character breaking, we’ll work together to create and include it. Examples of these dialogues can be seen right after assigning work but before entering the post work stage. Limit will be 1 dialogue exchange per Patron. This will be a one time reward so continued support at this level is not required, though you are free to do so if you wish.
NEW CAPPUCCINO+ TIER($30)
The current Cappuccino tier will be converted into a Legacy tier for early supporters as we phase it out. We don’t want to outright remove it because it is something that we promised Patrons. Instead, slots will be closed as supporters remove their pledge over time. After trying out the $20 price point, we've realized it's a bit unfair to Doku to create full color custom art at such a low price, especially when it also includes the game build, art package and soon the Machiatto reward.
In its place, we’ll be introducing a nearly identical tier. The only exception being that the art piece is a one time reward as well. This will allow us to include art requests from a wider range of Patrons and keep Doku from being overloaded. This tier will also have limited slots, but we will open more each month as Doku works through requests. If a patron wants, they can continue supporting us knowing that the drawing was a one time reward, or they can adjust their pledge the following month.
Patron Goal Revamp
Some features that are planned would be better off as community goals. For example, the undressing and the work day improvements. With these new game updates in mind, we’ve decided to rework the current goals to include them. Keep an eye on our goals because they'll be reflecting the new ones soon!
Distribution of builds via GumRoad
From day 1 we've been having trouble with distribution of our game builds. Patreon processes pledges on the 1st of each month, meaning that at first, people could pledge, download the build and immediately unpledge. Because of this, we ended up moving to direct email distribution. We are however, still left with the problem of supporters that barely miss the pledge cut off date and aren't able to obtain the latest build. As such, we've decided to upload the latest build on Gumroad, where it can be obtained for $5 as a standalone. Email distribution will continue for patrons and we'll be testing the Gumroad method out until Patreon grants us the "up front" pledge feature. (That would solve everything to be honest.)
With that, we bring our dev road map to a close. Work on Project Cappuccino will continue at full speed and we're extremely excited to bring you guys new and constant content!
Thank you guys for the amazing support!
-Vanis & Dokucchi
