Expresso Espresso - Progress Update 1 - Bare Basics

Hello fellow baristas!

Welcome to the first development update of Expresso Espresso, an in-depth coffee shop management game. Since this is our first devlog, we will introduce the development team. Then we will cover the following updates:

• Pixel Art
• World Generation
• Basic Building Management
  • Flood-Fill Mechanic

The Team

The Expresso Espresso development team currently consists of only one member, myself. I plan on expanding the team as we get further into development, but before recruiting anyone I need to have a working, playable demo of the game to showcase my vision for Expresso Espresso.

Pixel Art

I prepared pixel art for the game 1-2 weeks ago, here's what we have so far:

This is essentially concept art of how I imagine a player would build a small cafe. You can see all the chairs where the NPCs will sit down, talk and order coffee drinks, and you can see the coffee machines: the Brewer and the Grinder. I haven't done any pixel art for the roastery yet as there are still game design decisions to be made for roasting coffee.

We also have some basic concept art of our characters. They're most definitely still a work in progress, but this is what we have so far. We want our NPCs to feel like people are actually coming to the cafe you constructed. They'll sit down and depending on your zoom level, you can read what some of the people are saying. 

World Generation

The world for Expresso Espresso is pretty simple. It starts out as a large grid of tiles you as the player can select, build, and place furniture on. This is my first attempt at an actual 2D game, so it was pretty fun and challenging deciding how I should differentiate each tile, but have them in an aligned grid. 

Each tile basically has an ID and that ID determines its texture, attributes, and mechanics. As the player, you get to tell the tile if it gets to be a wall, floor tile, or any furniture. Of course with the cost of money, you can't just construct a cafe from nothing! Side-note: The grid size at the moment is not final, it'll likely be bigger than what it currently is to compensate for larger player-built cafes.

Basic Building Management

When I say basic, I really mean basic. For now, the player can select or multi-select tiles, then build either walls or floors. That's pretty much it for now, but with the way I organized the tile database, adding in more tiles will be a smooth process. This allows for great future updates too

I know the graphics don't seem pleasing compared to the concept art, but I want to focus on getting all the mechanics down with essentially a basic art templated. Then I'll enhance all the graphics.

Conclusion and Future

That's it for this progress update! There was a lot to unpack here since I already started development on Expresso Espresso. I don't have a Steam page yet, as I figured it would be pretty useless to have a page without any trailers or thumbnails showcasing gameplay. Now that I'm done with the basic mechanics of the game, I can move on to creating a basic GUI, adding more furniture and tiles, and getting started on coffee creation states.