Hello, fellow baristas!

Today I have an exciting development update for all who may be reading this. After a fun Labor Day weekend, I got back to my college dorm, finished some studying/assignments, and got back to work on Expresso Espresso - the coffee shop management game! Today we'll be covering these updates:

• Roaster UI and Functionality
• Grinder UI and Functionality
• Quality of Life features

Roaster UI and Functionality

Over the past week, I worked on making the roaster machine have a functional UI. 

The giant white space is a placeholder for some pixel art of a roaster that I haven't done yet. You will be able to control the temperature and select what coffee blends, or coffee bean types, you can roast. The temperature affects the bitterness of the coffee beans. I plan on making this as in-depth as I possibly can, to the point where you can create the popular Blonde Roast from Starbucks. You can also save the settings with Save Blend. Every bag can produce about 10 - 15 coffee drinks, so it's essential for you as the player to keep the roaster going at least a few days, which you can manage in the Manage tab under Scheduling. That's for next week though :)

Grinder Functionality and UI

You have five settings to choose from, shown on the gif above. Typically, the more coarse the coffee grind is, the less strong and less bitter the drink would be and vice-versa.  This, like the roastery, will also affect the drinks taste. As the player, you get to create coffee grinds of different finest to create different coffee batches in the brewer. How bitter or how light-tasting the coffee will be, is up to you! As you hire more baristas, you can schedule these tasks to be on repeat.

Quality of Life Stuff

Just some small quality of life changes, I added in a simple ghost object for selecting and placing items. It helped me a lot when debugging tile placement.

And that's it for today! As I said before, we're getting into the fun stuff! A good chunk of gameplay mechanics/features will be implemented in the following weeks. After I get NPCs and pathfinding down, I believe I would be comfortable enough to release a demo for here before creating the Steam page! Don't forget to follow and like this devlog for more, awesome coffee creation :)