When do runs end?

[Deadweight]

I'm on my 4th? tier, I've been given the "master barista" crown twice and the game doesn't seem to be getting harder or doing anything to stop me. I can't seem to choose to end my run, how many sets do I have to go through?

[Ondra & Alenka | Broccoli Games]

Thank you for your question!
By earning the crown, you have reached the maximum difficulty level and unlocked all of the caravan expansions in a given world. There is no hard end to the game because we wanted to give players the opportunity to grow their business. At that point, the game essentially turns into a sandbox.

But if you haven't tried it yet, you can then try the Tea World, which has its own recipes and thus brings a gameplay change. Also, the Tea World is a little harder than the Coffee World, so if you like a challenge, you can give it a try.

[Deadweight]

Thanks for the answer.

I have a few thoughts so far, these might be addressed, if so I apologise.

Difficulty:
Going endless is fun enough, but the Difficulty needs to scale, in plate up you get more customers, more problems, in balatro the score target scales. In this I didn't feel stressed at any point (especially later on) there was no reason to rejig my shop, there weren't more customers, so it kind of felt a little pointless.

Customers:
Extra tables felt kind of useless. I never had more than one customer at once, sometimes two especially on final days, but things were very chill. I'm not saying we need things super difficult, but I feel like a few things are rather pointless at the moment because the game is pretty chill.

All in all, I really enjoyed the game, but the lack of scaling difficulty, nor an option to end the game gave me satisfaction in the feeling that I had pushed myself to my limit. I simply found a set up that worked and went with it until I got bored.

Things like ascensions, more mid run modifiers/equipment etc and I would be more than happy with the game.

[Ondra & Alenka | Broccoli Games]

Thank you for the great feedback and your opinion.
We are currently working on how to properly set the difficulty level. Thanks to the graphics and the overall atmosphere of the game, the game has attracted many cozy players who don't want a big challenge and stressful experience, and we don't want to disappoint them. But on the other hand, some people expect a real challenge from management games.
So we are trying to find the right balance.
Thank you for your feedback, it will help us to make a better decision!

[kdot]

Yeah I agree with the OP this is a really fun game but gets very easy (and may get boring) quite quickly so I'm hoping there's some tweaking or difficulty scaling for later runs so it maintains replayability without alienating "cozy" players. Maybe just opt-in to a difficulty increase (i.e., more customers / sending 2x customers at a time etc.) each loop otherwise keep it the same if that's the player's preference... or just unlock some kind of difficulty setting after becoming a "master" that lets you set like 1x, 1.5x, 2x, etc. traffic amounts.

Also, the balance seems a little wonky, like I don't see a good reason to have more than 2-3 tables and then just stacking a bunch of plants/etc. to give bonuses. This would probably be harder to tweak but I think in general maybe the customers should stay at the tables longer with their beverage and that would encourage more seating / less bonus stacking, and have a side effect of players having to juggle more dirty dishes. Maybe this is more just player choice though, like if you want to layout a pretty looking cafe vs just minmax with like 2 tables and 30 plants.

Anyway, just my two cents.

[Ondra & Alenka | Broccoli Games]

Oprindeligt skrevet af kdot:

Yeah I agree with the OP this is a really fun game but gets very easy (and may get boring) quite quickly so I'm hoping there's some tweaking or difficulty scaling for later runs so it maintains replayability without alienating "cozy" players. Maybe just opt-in to a difficulty increase (i.e., more customers / sending 2x customers at a time etc.) each loop otherwise keep it the same if that's the player's preference... or just unlock some kind of difficulty setting after becoming a "master" that lets you set like 1x, 1.5x, 2x, etc. traffic amounts.

Also, the balance seems a little wonky, like I don't see a good reason to have more than 2-3 tables and then just stacking a bunch of plants/etc. to give bonuses. This would probably be harder to tweak but I think in general maybe the customers should stay at the tables longer with their beverage and that would encourage more seating / less bonus stacking, and have a side effect of players having to juggle more dirty dishes. Maybe this is more just player choice though, like if you want to layout a pretty looking cafe vs just minmax with like 2 tables and 30 plants.

Anyway, just my two cents.

Thank you for your feedback and opinion. We are looking into the difficulty and how to improve it. We'll try to come up with more changes as soon as possible. Thanks for your help!

[Deadweight]

Love the proactiveness :)
I feel like if you're using the slay the spire template, difficulty is kind of assumed. It doesn't have to be brutal, but it should be noticeable, and get harder as you go on. challenge days that force a certain recipe on you, weather modifiers, paying upkeep or any number of ways could engage that beyond just more customers too.

For a casual run, it could be called "coffee break" or "decaffeinated" :P and the "standard" / harder mode "caffeine fuelled"

I would say the only thing I really struggled with on my run was ensuring everything was set up in time. I ran at least 6 recipes pretty much constantly (iced coffee, coffee with milk, pour over, latte, caramel, hazelnut and pumpkin). I picked up anything that bulked up numbers I could find, so 10 serving coffees, bigger cups, 4 space washing machine. with so many recipes and so few customers, I *never* had to redo the filter or pour over coffee and rarely had to remake the latte toppings.

Perhaps, paradoxically, more options = easier run. Not only do you get more money (I had far more than I could spend from tier 2 onwards), but fewer customers means less pressure.

[Ondra & Alenka | Broccoli Games]

Oprindeligt skrevet af Deadweight:

Love the proactiveness :)
I feel like if you're using the slay the spire template, difficulty is kind of assumed. It doesn't have to be brutal, but it should be noticeable, and get harder as you go on. challenge days that force a certain recipe on you, weather modifiers, paying upkeep or any number of ways could engage that beyond just more customers too.

For a casual run, it could be called "coffee break" or "decaffeinated" :P and the "standard" / harder mode "caffeine fuelled"

I would say the only thing I really struggled with on my run was ensuring everything was set up in time. I ran at least 6 recipes pretty much constantly (iced coffee, coffee with milk, pour over, latte, caramel, hazelnut and pumpkin). I picked up anything that bulked up numbers I could find, so 10 serving coffees, bigger cups, 4 space washing machine. with so many recipes and so few customers, I *never* had to redo the filter or pour over coffee and rarely had to remake the latte toppings.

Perhaps, paradoxically, more options = easier run. Not only do you get more money (I had far more than I could spend from tier 2 onwards), but fewer customers means less pressure.

Thank you so much! We're really learning a lot from this, it's our first game. We are very happy when someone describes the other side of the view.

Yes, the system is set up so that when a player gets better recipes, the difficulty goes down and they get more money. We thought it would be a kind of reward for the player to get through the difficult beginning and then relax. But it's possible that it should be the other way around 🙃

[Deadweight]

I think it's risk and reward, at least from the POV of a challenging run, rather than a relaxing coffee shop experience.

plateup gives you more recipes *and* more customers to keep piling on stress, giving you set bonuses and automation to compensate until eventually, you fail. Balatro gives you planet cards and ways of tooling your deck until you eventually fail.

Here your coffee shop gets less customers, meaning less running around with more recipes, putting all the pressure on a single burst of preparation, where someone focusing a small number of recipes will constantly be stressing on refilling resources (unless they get the fun stuff like 4x automatic grinders and 10x drip coffee makers) and multiple of them at that. In return for a more relaxed run, you're also granted far more money and a multiplier.

I feel like the game positively reinforces this thought as well, by demanding you take a certain amount of recipes into "boss fights"

[DanielleRose84]

I think the “difficulty” is subjective, myself and others I have watched steam it have struggled. If the difficulty level was going to be amended then there needs to be options for people to choose as this then will suit the needs of everyone but obviously I’m not a game developer so I have no idea how difficult that would be to implement.

[Killerjon101]

Love the game. I do agree that the difficulty needs to increase though as I found too easy. I maxed all recipes and had them all going at once and still not stressed (was pretty chill actually lol). I don't think you need to do anything crazy other than maybe add a (expert difficulty) after beating the game for the gamers who love the game but want a challenge. This leaves the cozy players alone while creating a challenge for the others if they choose too. To do this you can triple the amount of customers, have a no plant option, create special stages with timeframes or even make every appliance become manual with no automatic upgrades etc. Tons of different options. Overall very solid game though! Great job!

[DanielleRose84]

Oprindeligt skrevet af Killerjon101:

Love the game. I do agree that the difficulty needs to increase though as I found too easy. I maxed all recipes and had them all going at once and still not stressed (was pretty chill actually lol). I don't think you need to do anything crazy other than maybe add a (expert difficulty) after beating the game for the gamers who love the game but want a challenge. This leaves the cozy players alone while creating a challenge for the others if they choose too. To do this you can triple the amount of customers, have a no plant option, create special stages with timeframes or even make every appliance become manual with no automatic upgrades etc. Tons of different options. Overall very solid game though! Great job!

These are great suggestions, I like them a lot

[Deadweight]

Whilst I do think the game in general needs to be a *little* harder, what I really think it needs is scaling difficulty, as you progress, things get harder, otherwise every upgrade you get simply makes things easier (which is fine for a casual mode). It should be a challenge (like StS etc) to reach that final boss to give a sense of achievement. Past that, infinite is fine to test builds, but it should also scale and test the player.

I'm not advocating for blanket difficulty increases, in case it seemed like that!

[Ondra & Alenka | Broccoli Games]

Thank you all for the great feedback! We are already working on a system that will allow you to adjust the difficulty level. Once we have fixed the basic bugs and most common issues, we will try to release this update as well.