The first customer (and the shop's first 25)

Hello — I am writing this before dawn, only a few hours after the last entry. But I do not think this one can wait, because the thing I promised at the end of the last one has actually happened, on that very same night.

The first customer has walked into the shop.

☕ The first order on the rope

If you look at the first picture, you will see a little card hanging at the edge of the screen — that is the shop's first "order slip". The customer (still a pink capsule for now, do not laugh yet) came in through the door, picked a table, sat down, and ordered one coffee off the menu we had put up for sale that day. The coffee card sprang straight up onto the rope, carrying the little picture of a heart-topped coffee cup that the team had only finished drawing that evening.

From there it is the iron rule I told you about last time — you walk over and take the job on at the ingredient cupboard (the coffee beans and the milk really did come off the shelf), you walk to the drinks machine, wait a moment, and there is a cup of coffee in your hands. Then you walk over and put it down on the table in front of the customer — really put it down, mind you. There is a cup standing on the table where you can see it, not just a number changing.

🍽️ Eat, pay, get up — and leave the plate for us

The customer finished eating, paid 25, got up and left. And left one dirty plate behind on the table.

And then comes the fun part: for as long as that plate is still sitting there, the next customer will not sit at that table. We have to go and clear it away ourselves (one press, a short wait, the plate is gone) before the table is genuinely free. It is small details like this that start to make a "shop" feel like a shop — everything comes from somewhere and goes somewhere, someone has to be responsible for it, and nothing disappears on its own.

Press to close the day and the summary comes up as in the second picture: 1 group of customers · 1 dish sold · 25 taken. The tiniest numbers, and the ones our team is prouder of than any others, because every unit of them passed through the player's hands at every single step.

🌙 Behind tonight

A little aside — all of this happened on the same night as the last entry. The team split into three lanes: one building the game's systems, one building the data and the screens, and a third going over the first two's work, picking at it as hard as it possibly could. And the checking lane really did find something — a spot where, left alone, a customer would order a dish the shop had run out of and the whole kitchen would seize up solid. So we got to fix it before the first customer was ever born to run into it. Many times cheaper than fixing it afterwards.

The same promise as always — I will tell it as it happens, both the nights when everything joins up and the nights spent sitting there working out why the team's website was serving the wrong kind of file at four in the morning. (Tonight had both of those, haha.) See you in the next entry — I hope I will have more than one customer to tell you about. 🐈☕