I wanted to give an update on my progress. I’m not really happy with how things turned out last month.

I spent the last month working on a feature that I thought would be simple to add: Kitchen windows. It turned out to be much more complex than I had anticipated, and I had to rewrite a lot of existing code in order to get the kitchen windows to work.

To make matters worse, when I eventually did get them to work on a technical level, I found out that they were not working on a gameplay level. Using kitchen windows almost never actually made a restaurant more efficient. Which means that they are essentially useless.

I’ve experimented with multiple ways to solve this issue, but none of the experiments really went anywhere. I’m sure that there is a solution that I’m missing, but I already spend much more time on kitchen windows than I intended to. That’s why I decided to set the kitchen window idea aside for now, and focus on more important issues. Hopefully I can return to the idea in the future.

I pushed the latest build with kitchen windows to the experimental branch, so you can still play around with them. Please let me know if you have any suggestions on how to improve them.

The kitchen window idea not working out was a huge disappointment. But it did have some good side effects. It allowed me to rewrite a lot of important code, and reflect on my game design process. I hope that I can prevent this kind of thing from happening in the future by better prioritizing what I work on.

I will be taking a little summer break, and the game still needs some work to be stable enough for the main branch. The next update will be on the 12th of august. After this update, I will go back to regular updates. I’m really looking forward to adding exciting new features, and making TasteMaker a better game.