Cafebara

Serve your customers!
Cute furry friends!
Coffee making stations!
Leaderboard to challenge your friends

Inspiration

We sought to create a game that was both relaxing and satisfying for the player whether they were on a mobile or VR device. Partially inspired by nostalgic online flash games like ‘Papa’s Pizzeria’, we thought the game needed to be relaxing first and foremost—dosing players with Oxytocin through our adorable customers and their cute drinks. Achieving this meant ensuring the game responded seamlessly to every interaction. Any disruptions would break player immersion and undermine our goal.

What it does

Cafebara is a cafe simulator game where you step into the role of a barista, crafting as many accurate orders as possible for your adorable, fluffy customers. Success depends on how quickly and precisely you fulfill orders, as well as the tips you earn.

The mechanics are smooth, intuitive, and accessible, ensuring a seamless experience. To make the game even more immersive, we created all the music and sound effects ourselves, alongside with all the art and models in the room.

How we built it

Code - Our programming started at the game design phase. We made sure to consider the scope of the programming required before deciding on what mechanics to include. Once the feature set was finalized, we created diagrams to outline the software design—an essential step to avoid the chaos that can come with designing code as it is written. From there, we wrote our game logic using Horizon’s typescript feature, testing along the way for any bugs that arise.

Audio - All the sound effects in Cafebara are custom-made in Ableton Live 11. We used a mix of particular samples, digital processing, and synthesizers to craft audio that sounded equally friendly and nostalgic. Further, the soundtrack for Cafebara was designed with a relaxing backdrop in mind.

Art - The art was designed with cuteness and comfort in mind. I focused on integrating lots of squircles in blender and cute basic textures in substance painter, all of which seemed to align with the cartoony horizon characters. At the end of the day my biggest priority was creating an environment that made that player feel comfortable and happy to be in

Challenges we ran into

Our team was brand new to Horizon Worlds; This meant that we had to learn the Horizon’s development workflow on the fly! This was particularly challenging for our programmers, who not only had to familiarize themselves with Horizon’s TypeScript API but also tackle TypeScript for the first time. Despite this learning curve, we were able to adapt quickly and produce an experience we are proud of.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are very proud of how our game looks and feels to play, and we hope to provide a cute and fun experience for everyone who tries it. Beyond the game itself, we are also incredibly proud of how much we have achieved in such a short time. Learning the development tools of a new platform was challenging. It pushed us to adapt quickly to a new environment.

What we learned

We learned a lot about what it means to be creators on a growing platform. While there are many limitations to what we can do, these ultimately empower us, pushing us to innovate as we work toward developing a fun and engaging game for everyone.

Throughout the process, we also gained insights into leadership. We learned how to effectively coordinate tasks and make decisions as a team, using collaborative platforms. Additionally, we explored new tools and techniques, such as setting up audio on our PC to record the audio in-game flawlessly.

Overall, we learned that it's not that scary going into a new working environment. Walking in with an open mind, willing to learn helped us a lot.

What's next for Cafebara

In the future, we would love to make this game multiplayer. Due to time constraints, we were unable to implement this feature initially. Now that we are more familiar with the in-game tools, we feel more confident about adding this.

Additionally, we are exploring kitchen upgrades to allow players to progress further in the game. We are also considering upgrades for the cafe itself, which would improve customer waiting times etc.