Really love the art and music! What a charming and endearing concept as well, with adorable animations to boot!
It takes too long to get meaningful upgrades as they're too expensive and a coffee only gets me $10 per order. So at the start I need to grab, carry and repeat the same order at least 5 times. And if I get the door mat first , I have to do the same order about 10-15 times again.
Once I get the fridge, I have to make the same coffee order, I have to do roughly 30 more coffee orders until I get another meaningful upgrade. Even more time if too many people order the $5 water as well.
So it feels like it's taking forever to buy things in the shop, get more variety and progress in the game. Progress for such a mechanically simple game should feel faster in my opinion.
About the shop, since most of the game is played on the keyboard having the shop ONLY navigable with a mouse feels a bit awkward. Also, the first upgrade you see when you first get the shop is the door mat, which doesn't do anything as far as I can tell. I don't think it should be the first thing players see in the shop, cause then most (including myself) will naturally buy it first, and it'll take longer to reach their first meaningful upgrade.
Also, bringing up the water again. Why should I bother to serve that? I honestly never served any water at some point since it was a waste of time and there is no consequence to not helping customers. Nothing happens if I get the wrong order even. Why serve the $5 customers when I can only focus on the $10, $15 and above :p
I think it would be cool if the text bubble of the order starts out with layer of green on top of the art, and as time goes by, it diminishes, then turns yellow and finally turns red. And if enough time goes by, they use a spell to turn you into a frog or something. (It IS a magical cafe after all :P)
It probably wouldn't be too detrimental, since the game is going for a more relaxed tone.
If you get multiple greens in a row though, you get some tips and a multiplier, so more money if you do really well though!
I think it would be really cool if customers interacted with each other more and the player could maybe even interact with them. Would make the cafe feel more alive and building relationships with the customers is something that I think would fit the feeling of a magical cafe the game is going for.
A few last notes are to have the player move slightly faster and diagonally, so I don't feel so dang slow. Also, to have some "waiter's tray" upgrades so I can carry more than one order at a time later as there are more varieties on the menu and I don't have to keep walking back and forth.
Oh, and sometimes customers just seem to get stuck at the door for some reason? I don't know why :P
Sorry for the long review, but I only did it because I found this game really charming and wanted to give feedback so it gets even better! I just hope you find it helpful at least. XD
I hope you work on it more and expand it! :D
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Wow, thank you so much for the detailed feedback! We spent so much time testing with unlimited money that we didn't realize the game was so grindy, so we'll definitely work on that. All of your ideas are great, so we'll definitely take them in account for future updates to make the game as fun as possible. Thanks for playing!
PS: the customers getting stuck is a bug that came up in the last hour of the jam so we didn't manage to fix it :p