The night we almost built the ending before the beginning

Hello. Last time I signed off by saying that next in the queue was giving the shop a real "day" of its own — open up, have something to do, close up, and then a new morning arrives. Tonight we spread the blueprint out and got ready to actually start on it. But the thing I want to tell you about today is the moment, in the middle of the night, when I had to pull the brakes on my own team.

🛑 The brakes, in the middle of the night

The first blueprint sounded wonderful — a clock inside the game, the shop opens and a customer walks in, they order, the machine finishes the food, you serve it, you take the money, and in the evening the day's takings get totted up. The whole reel, start to finish.

But going down it line by line, I saw something rather frightening — it was building the "ending" while the "beginning" still does not exist. The shop does not even have a cupboard to keep ingredients in yet. No stove. No menu to choose what to sell from. So what exactly would a customer be walking in to order?

The charm of a game like this is the player's slow climb — one new thing at a time, a little better at it each time. So I decided that the game's systems have to be built in the same order the player is going to meet them, rather than jumping ahead to build the closing scene and coming back to fill in the middle afterwards.

🧊 The kitchen has to come before the customers

So tonight's new blueprint came out like this: in the early part of the game, the player does everything themselves. No staff yet (and no cats yet either — patience, they are definitely coming).

We start from the things the player's hands have to touch every day — one big ingredient cupboard, three metres tall; three cooking stations; tables for the customers; and one iron rule we are very proud of, brought over from the old shop: every job in the kitchen has to begin at the ingredient cupboard. Take a job on and the ingredients really do come off the shelf, and you hold one job at a time. That single rule makes bugs of the "food conjured out of thin air" and "the queue in a muddle" sort impossible right down at the root.

As for the first customer — they only walk in once this kitchen is genuinely ready to serve. The customer is the ending of this chapter, not the start of it.

🍳 The new shop's first food

The picture above is the first round of things to eat in the new shop — 5 menu items and 10 ingredients. Coffee, tea, a croissant, strawberry cake, a sandwich, and the whole team of ingredients that goes with them.

The part that makes me smile as I tell it is that these are not just pretty pictures. Every one of them genuinely exists inside the game already — it has a recipe, the ingredients it needs, and a price. And all of it can be edited from the same website on my phone, the one I was lying on the sofa with when I changed the colour of a counter. A new menu item = a few more lines of data. Nothing has to be torn open.

🚪 The doors left open and waiting

There is one thing the team was very deliberate about tonight, even though none of it shows in a picture — every system we built tonight has already left a door waiting for the things that have not arrived yet.

Which way a cat will come in and make a mess of the kitchen; which spot at each machine a waiter will go and stand on. The job queue has left slots open for all of it, so those things can be plugged straight in without knocking down what is already there. This time we know which way this house is going to grow — so we put up every door frame in advance.

So what next

It is gone three in the morning as I write this, and the machines are still working away through the night (our team does not sleep much, heh). Next time I would like to come and tell you about the first customer who really eats something out of this kitchen — walks in, sits down at a table, orders, waits, eats, pays, and walks back out with a full stomach.

The old promise still stands in full — I will tell it as it happens, the nights that run smooth and the nights I have to pull the brakes on myself. See you again in the next entry. 🐈☕