The newest update… it’s beautiful!
I don’t want to say much to spoil anything but I hope it only continues getting bigger and better from here!
I get the feeling I will have to join your Discord though as I keep having ideas I would like to share, if that’s okay of course.
Keep up the amazing work!
5 Likes
Really love the game but days feel a bit long for what they are. I’d also love for the game to transition into more of a method of eating and milking as you become a “full cow”
2 Likes
v0.4.3 is now out as the public build! Here’s what’s new!
0.4.3
- Cameos added
- Creachures added
- Gallery for viewing in-game images added
- Bonus development images added to the gallery
- kitty
13 Likes
The art style is so cute! Love all the little fun details like the owner’s little animations. Haven’t been able to get too far in my first session but I already love it.
2 Likes
I absolutely LOVED this game. Emily is super cute and perfectly fills her role as a ‘cow’. The gameplay is very absorbing and rewarding; to the point that, after max-ing Emily out, I continued playing several in-game days with full abandon without minding the lack of plot progress.
Now, I have a tendency to nitpick games I love, and find ways to break them whenever possible… so I’ve got a list of bugs and suggestions, in order of perceived importance! Please don’t take them as criticisms, but compliments. I wouldn’t spend this much time on a game less than great!
Progression/Pacing
1. The game loop is awesome. But I think the game sells itself short with too-fast pacing.
I think the game could be slowed down considerably without trying the players’ patience. That would also make each weight stage feel more rewarding. As it was, I managed to get to stage 9 on day 20 on a first playthrough, and on day 15 a second time through. That’s faster than a stage every other day! Personally, I wouldn’t have minded at all if it had taken 2 or 3 times as long. That would also provide more incentive to diversify the menu, etc.
How to accomplish that? I would suggest that each successive weight stage require higher fullness to gain any weight, since bigger cows need more food to grow.
I really think a change in this vein would make an already great game even better. It increases the incentive to use fullness and capacity stickers, and increases the effort needed to progress the plot without changing the difficulty of the core game loop.
(I tried a playthrough where I edited the files to subtract 50% base capacity from fullness before adding weight, and it definitely slowed things down nicely, by about 33%. Though, with this method losing weight is possible. I like the idea!)
Tutorial Game-Breaker
2. During the tutorial, you are prevented from eating the dish the customer ordered until after you’ve eaten the ‘wrong’ dish. But you can eat the ordered dish after eating the other one. The game will act as though you delivered the order, then crash shortly after.
This would be a great place for a comic line or two instead!
3. Also, for what it’s worth, the tutorial customer is not visible at the table when returning to the diner view with the food.
OP Lunch
4. One of the most enjoyable aspects of the game for me was sneaking food while handling orders. It was super easy at first, but as the time crunch got more hectic, it was really becoming difficult, which is awesome! That’s when I decided to increase the lunch size… and it turns out there’s no cap to it.
Since it’s also the cheapest bonus to buy, it’s relatively simple to bump lunch up to, say, 20 and never need to eat during shifts again. I would recommend a cap to keep eating during shifts relevant. Perhaps a hard cap like 8 or 10 fullness, or something like 50% of base capacity.
Stickers
5. The Employee Retention Strategy stickers have no effect.
6. Exploit: When full, removing a Room to Grow sticker and then re-activating it creates empty stomach space.
7. I would love the ability to add slots for more than three stickers. Perhaps a hefty cash payment could do the trick?
Table Hit Boxes
8. Just adding a point to second what others have mentioned on this point.
9. But also, at the higher weight stages, it’s hard to see table 2’s exclamation point when they need to be served. Sometimes, I think they’ve been automatically served, when really they’re on the clock!
Vending Machine
10. The low-fat cookies are actually better than advertised! They say they’ll increase weight gained by 15%, but it’s actually causing a 25% gain. Pretty powerful.
Lactation
11. Normally, these elements wouldn’t appeal to me, but I don’t mind them here, perhaps because they fit the theme well. However, it’s just there. It would be interesting if the lactation were incorporated more into the plot.
Why is Cowe collecting the milk? Where does it go? Perhaps Emily could be rewarded something based on the amount pumped? That would incentivize faster pumping stickers over simply increasing milk capacity to the point where one never needs to pump during a shift.
12. If you are serving a table when milk capacity reaches full and Emily is sent to the pumping room, you can still serve dishes to that table even from that room.
13. When milk capacity is at 5.00 in the pumping room, Emily’s sprite switches back to the non-full version. I’m not sure if this is true at max capacity for stages 7 and 8.
14. When eating with the full milk capacity sprite, Emily’s sprite flashes briefly to the non-full version during the eating animation.
Desirable Add-Ins
15. The ability to disable condiments is a life-saver. Would it be possible to do the same to the extra mains? It would be interesting to be able to try, say, 3 dishes with 6 condiments; but once you’ve bought more dishes, you’re stuck.
16. In the early game, there is a lot of down-time. Any way to incorporate a timer-skip?
17. This is a big ask, but: the stuffed sprites and full sprites kick in at 50% capacity. Can we hold out any hope for 100% sprites, at least at the higher weights?
18. It’s easy enough to get through the game without buying extra meal types or condiments, or using money stickers. I didn’t use any during my second playthrough, which I cleared to stage 9 in 15 days. Emily made enough cash with just the standard 3-meal set to eat soda and cookies daily, and get a few capacity stickers at the gacha.
I don’t have any specific ideas here, but maybe these could be incentivized or made mandatory to keep reputation up?
Photo Bug
19. While on the extra photos page, going to the save menu and returning causes the first bonus photo to be visible, even if it’s not purchased yet.
Thanks for reading! Keep up the hard work.
5 Likes
Amazing feedback, firstly thanks for enjoying our game!!! It means alot that you played enough to find all these bugs and came up with suggestions. Definitely alot to think about and work on with this, luckily most of it is gameplay related so i can shout at Galac for all the bugs mwehehe, but things like the overlapping of customer sprites are things i’ve definitely considered redrawing the background and setup for when I can get back into development proper.
You’ve been a massive help even with finding things like stickers not functioning and the tutorial bugs too, so thanks once more !!!
On the note of an extra stuffed sprite for emily, the scope of each weight stage has ballooned with each update, having only 2 sprites in the early stages up to 19 unique sprites (20 if you count the casual outfit!) for weight stage 9, and adding another stuffed sprite would also mean tweaking the topless versions of the sprites, the different sprites with how full the chest is, etc - so its not something I see getting added soon. Once we get to a nice ending of sorts, I wouldn’t be too against going back and adding to previous sprites though!
8 Likes
Whoo, what a wonderful set of feedback! Let me go over these one-by-one.
I hear ya! We have been definitely stifled by event pacing thanks to the weight stages tending to fly by. To alleviate that, I have doubled the weight requirements for each stage. The sluggishness of the early-game being made worse by this change should hopefully be helped by my response to point 16.
Fixed!
Capped.
Fixed!
Fixed! Maybe, I haven’t tested it.
Added, sort of! The functionality was already there, I just tweaked how it appeared a little! You seem pretty savvy. Set stickerRows to 2 or 3 and see what happens on your copy!
Fixed!
Fixed!
Fixed!
Fixed!
Added, sort of! The original 3 dishes cannot be disabled!
Sort of fixed? I adjusted the table population and depopulation functions to sort of ramp down as the days go on. So they start pretty fast while you have no reputation to make the early days have something to do, and then by day 7 when you start getting upgrades, have more tables open thanks to reputation, etc. it caps the rate so that it doesn’t get too slow.
If you’re a math nerd, the new depopulation chance is randint(0,150) < int(39 + day / 4) and randint(0, 150) < 15
The new population chance is randint(0,150) < (int(int(reputation) * 2 * 2/day)) and randint(0,150) < int(7 * (reputation / 5))
Fixed!
3 Likes
Wow, that was super fast! I can’t wait to give it a try again. Thanks!
1 Like
These aren’t uploaded yet, don’t know when they will be. They could end up in a patch by themselves or they could end up in 0.5. The weight doubling puts a dampener on what I can immediately do.
2 Likes
No rush! The anticipation will be enjoyable. I’ll keep an eye out.
v0.4.4 is out now!
Just some bug fixes and balance changes. Also now purchased dishes can be disabled, just like condiments can.
8 Likes
Seems like I am going days during the early game with 0 customers 
Oops! Implementing one of my requests has caused an error.
In this new version (0.4.4), one cannot order any of the extra meal types. Clicking on them simply disables them, even during a shift. That’s a problem when one of them gets ordered!
Seems like I am going days during the early game with 0 customers
The new version has fixed this, far and away.
Fixed that issue, new upload up.
Me again! I hope I’m being helpful and not just annoying… I’m certainly still enjoying this game.
After a few days, the scale is now showing lots of decimal places for Emily’s weight. I think the chips are the cause (since they were changed to +15%). Perhaps the weight variable should be rounded before display.
3 Likes
for now, when an item is disabled, it can’t be ordered. So you should just leave them disabled all the time
Thanks for the suggestion; but the latest upload is fixed!
Alright, I’m STILL playing this game - just finished a third playthrough - and wouldn’t you know, I managed to break it again.
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Reaching 100% milk capacity while serving a table now causes the game to crash.
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When reaching 100% milk capacity at the order window, Emily appears in the milking room. However, dishes that were in the cooking process will still appear on the screen when finished; and if you had selected a condiment, you can still add it to the dish. I’m not sure what other loophole interactions may be possible there.
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If the shift ends while Emily is being milked, her milking sprite will remain on the screen. This happened to me immediately before the ‘stuck’ scene, and Emily was still fully on display while preparing for the afternoon shift. Fortunately for the Cafe’s reputation, clicking Clock In fixed it.
Hopefully I’ll shut up soon. I may give this thing another run, though. I have perfected my strategy, but it is dependent on how quickly the gacha is willing to give me legendary ERS stickers. At one point I was hauling in $2400 in one shift and over 100 WMU per day!
2 Likes