Ultimate Indie - Week 3 day 2 Boba Tycoon feedback and planning

Sunday was pretty full since we went bike riding and watch the end of Celebrity Traitors UK with our friends so I didn’t get a chance to do much on this, and I actually started this entry yesterday but I’m back to it today. I also spent a little but of time playing some other people’s projects and giving feedback, I’d like ot make sure I keep doing it!

Today I’m going to round up all the feedback I got and organise it in a way that makes sense to add an order to action the items. I got some feedback from some friends who were happy to play it and give me feedback and some from the people in the Ultimate Indie discord!

Here is the list of feedback:

Feedback

Small change suggestions

• on the sliders
  • It wasn’t clear to everyone that the sliders are sliders
    • maybe change the arrow to something else
  • some people clicked higher on the bar and started with a very fast fill rate
  • the 0 zone is not big enough for turning off the flow
  • The order of sliders seems out of order - its easier to put the pearls in first
  • the sliders could be made to look more like levers or taps to help indicate what they do
• on the recipe indicators/order
  • it was hard to tell which ingredient should line up to each line
• on the seal cup
  • allowing player to seal cup when lower than 95% is wanted, player choice!
  • there should be feedback on how well you did based on how close you were to the recipe, eg F tier to S+++ 😂
  • there should be penalties for making an order far away from the recipe
• Overflow
  • there should be a spill penalty (suggestion was that screen would have a splash and you would have to wipe it all off before continuing)
  • it shouldn’t stop you from pouring if you overflow, you should have to turn off the pouring

Additions/Larger change suggestions

• without time pressure there is no need to risk going faster
• force tough decisions (a la papers please money phase)
• each ingredient should have a different mechanic, for example pearls should be scooped
• button mash to make the pour rate go up and then decay (add a hold instead for accessibility)
• customer feedback after getting their drink
• funny customers (like Jorji or Pumpkin Spice lady)
• seasons for seasonal drinks
• customer order modifiers
• customer order recall (“Can I get what you gave me yesterday?”)

Luckily some of the feedback lined up with my upcoming changes:

• Day timer
• Order timer
• Spill conditions

I may have to rank the higher calling ones to address the most wanted feedback, however:

Inspirations

I have also thought that the feedback of each ingredient should have a different mechanic seems like it lines up with the idea (that I got from IndieGameClinic) that games are a series of toys that have been strung together:

What Joe explains at 2:20 is that a toy is inherently fun to play with and that is what makes good games fun - they are full of toys that are fun to interact with, strung together with goals and rules and challenges and rewards. The extra mechanic per ingredient feedback really made me think of old cooking toys and how much fun the Pop’n Cooking candy food making sets are.

I actually had a phase where I would watch a lot of Pop’n cooking videos and also miniature kitchen videos on youtube.

I even found a mini boba video while looking for the old ones I watched:

Embed was not allows so here is a screenshot and a link

I feel like the sound effects do a lot here to make it satisfying. I have started paying more attention to sound design and you really feel it when it’s not there.

I have now thought it would be more fun to play with if there were fun things to interact with, rather than an abstract button or slider, I can do a mini kitchen version of them. Quite a few people mention taps or levers. I would love it if it could feel just a little more tactile.

I had some thumbnails earlier of little minigames of the prep phase (like how pizza sim has a prep phase) and maybe I had something there that I should follow.

I also decided to go look at what other Boba games there were - I found a fairly simple one here. It was quite satisfying to have the pearls be individual balls with liquid physics.

There was also a Labubu Mukbang ASMR () minigame too and I enjoyed the mini kitchen cooking elements, but found it to be very shallow.

There were a tonne more food games at Crazygames which had little bits of fun “toy” elements but had short engagement. I want to look at what I like and what I don’t and think about incorporating them.

The biggest issue will be keeping the scope small! I’ll do my best.