Zoning Feedback

I reworked the zoning system this week. The game already had a simple system to restrict where staff was allowed to go, but I believe that it was too limited and had some major issues.

The main issue was that the game did not communicate whenever the employee could not reach a required item due to his/her zone being restricted. I tried to solve this by making employees adhere to their zone less strictly, but this made the zones less useful.

In this update employees adhere to their zones very strictly again, and I added notifications whenever zoning related issues are a bottleneck in an employee’s efficiency. This is communicated by displaying icons of out of reach items above the staff's head, and messages.

Zone Creation

There is now a separate window for creating zones. You can assign employees to zones in the individual employee option menu (the menu that pops up when you click on the employee)

Every zone can be renamed, and has color associated with it.

Table Settings

Setting dish settings on tables used to be a bit frustrating because you had to do it for every table individually. But tables now have a toggle that allows you to apply the dish settings to every table in the same zone as the selected table.

Dirty Tableware

In devblog 31 I introduced a particle that shows up when a plate has been sitting on a table for a long time. However, this was not really properly implemented. This update introduces several improvements to this idea.

The particle now shows up on all tableware instead of just plates. I also reworked the particle itself to look more like flies.

In terms of gameplay, dirty plates now actually reduce the restaurant's hygiene rating. I also made sure that plates are collected in order of dirtiness.

The hygiene overlay also received a small rework. Dirt on the floor, dirty plates and the dirt particle on tableware are now all visible in the overlay.

Small Changes

• Added small delay to placement hints
  
• Made negative profit red in stat screen
  
• Fixed issue with staff walking while standing still and being stuck
  
• Fixed wall / window decoration “Can’t place that there” bug