Skip to main content

Indie game storeFree gamesFun gamesHorror games
Game developmentAssetsComics
SalesBundles
Jobs
TagsGame Engines
(+1)

I think you mentioned something about wanting more feedback leading into your EA launch (I don't think it's ready for one tbh...), so I'm going to be as thorough as I can in this post. 

Most pressing issue with the game right now is the new player experience? I haven't ever tried the multiplayer, so I can't speak for the appeal on that side. Kinda got filtered by trying to make a coffee too, so these are my thoughts and suggestions from a very short playtime. 

  1. You're only told to open the cafe and serve customers with the place still in a mess with nothing prepared. 
  2. It would probably be better to start you inside the cafe, and then tell you to clean it up and prepare to open (I think most other cafe sims follow this format of having you get things ready first to teach you the basics).
  3. Having a dedicated tutorial segment where your senpai (TL Note: senior) maid teaches you how to make coffee would be good, since there's an awful lot of steps to get everything set up. When I'm left to try and figure things out for myself, I run into a lot of problems of try something -> turns out I need to do some other step first -> turns out I need to do something else first which leads to some frustration. You could even just have this as a separate single player mode before you come out and start your career(s) as maid cafe managers. 

Graphics are still really lackluster. You could try grabbing some free textures, rather than having flat colours that don't feel cozy or cute. Try playing with lighting a bit more, and it would also help immensely if the exterior of the cafe looked anything more than just a greybox (or, you could simply not let the maids leave to stop them from seeing it). Could also look into using other shaders like liltoon or poiyomi or whatever's popular in VRC/asset store stuff. 

Default font is cheap-looking, and you should try to make sure nothing in the game screams default Unity UI. Maybe a font that's sans serif? I took a quick look at Google fonts and something like Josefin Sans feels like it'd be a good fit. (although this was while I was cross-referencing the artbook PDF for Kemono Teatime and seeing if I could find a font with a similar vibe. )

Since you've already got vroid models set up in your pipeline, just use them for your customers as well. Give them a bit more personality than blue capsules. Make some serious-looking businessman come in and be a total maid nerd. I think seeing people that you would or wouldn't expect to be in a maid cafe is part of the charm in this idea. You just need some animations for them sitting down and making emotes back at the players, and possibly even have traits for what kind of orders they make. 

Also, if you're going for the friendslop route, then you should also consider what kind of wacky events you can put in, since those go viral for the stupid stuff that make an entire friend group laugh, rather than having everyone be stressed out managing orders.

The general chore-ness of most things, the low-quality feeling graphics, and the default Unity UI takes me out of the experience of being a cafe staff. As it stands, it just doesn't have enough polish to feel like something I'd want to pay for, even if I were to be a job simulator fan, but on the other hand, there's a lot of actionable items you can do to immediately improve the appeal of the game as a whole. The idea itself has a lot of potential, but a lot of it just hasn't been realized yet, and I hope you find a good direction to take it in.