► Originally published on: The Road to Beta. Updates on the Yatai Game.

Updates on the Yatai Game

Since the last published update, the game has made some modest progress, particularly in the dialogue system and the logic involved in cooking and serving food.

The kitchen

Speaking of subtlety, I have been iterating on different ways to provide feedback to the player while cooking.

Ingredients must be cooked for just the right amount of time to avoid being undercooked or burnt. It was a challenge to communicate these states without making them too flashy and while staying true to the "minimalist" essence I want Yatai Master to have.

I want to recreate the effort involved in preparing dishes in a space as small as a Yatai. However, I understand that dragging each ingredient to its corresponding slot for cooking might become tedious.

With that in mind, I implemented a contextual menu when right-clicking on an ingredient. This menu allows the player to place an ingredient in a cooking slot with less effort.

However, this simplification has an impact. Cooking ingredients manually adds points to the final quality of the food. It’s a way to reward the extra effort.

Refining Cooking Feedback and Streamlining Ingredient Placement in Yatai Master - IndieDB

The player will also be rewarded with more slots as they achieve certain milestones. More slots in the kitchen allow them to cook more ingredients simultaneously, which improves the speed of preparing customer orders.

The markets

Previously, I had a "homemade" version that handled dialogues in a very rudimentary way, making dialogue creation an unpleasant and error-prone task.

Before buying ingredients to start the day at the Yatai, it seems reasonable to know which ingredients you still have from the previous day. For this reason, I found it necessary to add a dedicated screen to view the available stock.

You can browse through all the ingredients, see the available quantity, and read a brief description of each one.

Stock Management in Yatai Master - IndieDB

Market purchases have been implemented, but excessive stockpiling of ingredients is not allowed...

Market Purchases and Stock Limitations in Yatai Master - IndieDB

The future

My priority is to have a first playable beta version that incorporates the essential aspects of the game, namely: cooking, serving, receiving customer feedback, and implementing the passage of days.

Based on the feedback received from the first brave players who dare to try the game in a very basic (not to say primitive) state, I will focus on stabilizing the core mechanics.

Thank you for making it this far.