Closed play-testing is now underway! Get in touch for a steam key!
Combining the incredibly addictive diner-dash mechanics of the early 2000s, set to a cozy café aesthetic. You’ve got yourself the starting ingredients to my first fully independent commercial game!
Wait tables, serve drinks and wash dishes to keep your customers happy! Then with the profit you’ve made, upgrade furniture, move to bigger spaces and mix and match your own shops design aesthetic!
I have been working on Cocoa Loco for the past 3 years, and although I have gone through a lot of different iterations, the games core focus and style has remained consistent.
The original prototype was built in Unity with a few primitive models and game logic that had a strong focus on game feel for the player.
I spend the next 2 years working on my Unity prototype, I learnt about state-machines, began teaching myself substance designer and kept working on my character and prop models and rigs. During this period I was also working full-time, trying to keep up a YouTube channel and participating in as many collaborations as possible.
By 2023 I was pretty burnt out, the game was getting close to a vertical slice but between my full-time job and trying to juggle the ever impeding stress of the cost of living crisis, I struggled to make any progress on Cocoa Loco. It wasnt until the Unity controversy, that I found extra motivation to experiment with different game engines. Godot, though fast to iterate with, felt empty and lacked the support in tools and assets I was looking for. Unreal for some peculiar reason just seemed to click for me. It was a few weeks before MIGW in 2023 that I decided to completely drop Unity and try rebuilding Cocoa Loco in Unreal, I can say now, a year later - that I am further along in my Unreal Project than I was in Unity after 3 years!
Just the other week I setup private play-testing on steam and began to gather feedback from friends and the small community I’ve created from my YouTube presence, since then I have been working on the most requested features. And have slowly seen Cocoa Loco rapidly change from a rough prototype, to a vertical slice… with a lot of rough edges.
The plan for now is to keep play-testing until the mechanics are set. Create a tutorial, work on upgrades and player progression. Then finally setup the Steam Page with a demo (most likely during Steam Next Fest or a similar seasonal event).
Depending on the response with Steam wishlists, it’s either a very intense development time. The response from the steam demo is going to be my guage on how the rest of the games scope is going to evolve through development. If the interest isnt really there, I will keep to my small scale mechanics and publish the game as soon as possible! However on the chance that I get an overwhelmingly positive response, I will plan to scope up! Organize some crowd-funding and start talking to more publishers about different opportunities.
I believe Cocoa Loco has the ability to be a cultural and financial success, whether I am able to achieve that is a different story – though I am always hopefully optimistic.