Hello!

Welcome to another update for Coffee Shop Tycoon, this time we focused on three major areas: Addressing feedback, bringing the game to more players, and modernizing the game. With that, let's start with some changes to retirement.

Employee retirement changes

We’ve heard your feedback loud and clear, "Employees are retiring too soon". Retirement is supposed to help balance the game to prevent having god employees that can single-handedly do everything after playing the game for a while. It is also a mechanic that tries to simulate employee rotation in real life and put some economic pressure to make the game a bit more challenging. For those reasons we are not fully getting rid of it yet, first we want to try something out. Starting from this update, any new employee that you hire will have a significantly longer retirement time, this retirement time depends on the level of the employee when you hire them. (Pro tip: Use the budget slider during the hiring process to scout for candidates with a higher level)

• For employees between level 1 and 2, retirement time will be up to 8 years
  
• For employees between level 3 and 5, retirement time will be up to 6 and a half years
  
• For employees level 6 and up, retirement time will be up to 5 and a half years
  

We hope this change lessens the burden of hiring new employees while keeping a fun and challenging balance.

Game available in Spanish

As native Spanish speakers and with a studio crew that is originally from Mexico, we wanted to make the game available in our language. This work also helped us find some gaps in the localization tech and fix some controls and screens that were truncating text or formatting it incorrectly. With this change, Coffee Shop Tycoon is now available in Spanish, English, and Chinese. We also leveraged AI technology to help speed up the process and we plan to keep using it to bring the game to new languages. We know there will be some errors when we first roll out those new languages, but we are confident that these tools will help us get the game to more players with our limited resources.

First location uplift

When reviewing the graphical fidelity of the different shop locations, we felt like the first location was feeling outdated and rough. Naturally, that was the first location we added to the game. We wanted to keep the same layout and overall look while making it look more polished. Without any further ado, here is a before and after. We hope you like the result!

Other changes

Finally, here is a list of other changes in this version.

• Fixed the materials of several plants that were rendering as opaque planes
  
• End of Trend notification ("The market has normalized") is now a popup and no longer pauses the game
  
• Localization fixes
  

What's next

We are still working on the following things:

Achievement Bug Fixes: It has come to our attention that some achievements are not working as expected, we will prioritize getting a fix ready to unlock anyone from achieving 100% completion.

Localization: Continue adding new languages to the game. We'll announce what those languages will be later this year and create new beta branches for people who want to test them out and provide feedback.

Steam Deck Verified: We are working to have CST appear as verified for the Steam Deck; we hope that this will help bring the joy of coffee to new homes.

64-bit support for macOS

Investigating gamepad support: We are testing out several approaches to support gamepads in the game. We are still far from achieving this, but we believe it will improve the game experience for those playing on mobile consoles like Steam Deck.

Thanks for your support, suggestions, and bug reports, please keep them coming. Enjoy your coffee!