Cafe Nigredo
Cafe Nigredo is a time management cooking sim about invoking dark magic to solve your petty disagreements. We're gonna defeat that jerkwad Jerry and his frou-frou coffee shop through hard work and dedication, and also this spooky book we found!
By day you'll serve customers and make rent, and by night you'll grasp powers mankind was never meant to wield in order to improve this week's margins!
DAY CONTROLS:
QWER + Left Mouse Button
Click on customers to take their orders.
Follow the onscreen prompts to prepare their drink.
Click on them again to deliver the finished order.
NIGHT CONTROLS:
ZXCV + Left Mouse Button
Choose a ritual from the tome, and follow the onscreen prompts.
This initial version of the game includes 5 days of gameplay.
Note: This game is built for a window size of 640 X 480 and does not currently have the ability to be resized. If the browser either forces full-screen or expands the window size, manually adjust your browser window back to 640 X 480. Aim to line up with the main menu art on startup.
Game completion leaderboard
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1. Faulko
Comments
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ohhh !! Why didnt I see this before? Its so awesome. Once I understood how to play (had trouble understanding the UI) I has a blast.
Music is chill and well done!
Thank you for your comment! Glad you liked it!
Dark magic coffee, I was very attracted to it!
I didn't understand the cafe part well at first, serving coffee to customers, but I enjoyed it as I gradually got a feel for how to get a high rating.
I didn't really understand the effects of the black magic at night, but it was fun to complete the spells, meow~!
my playthrough
Wow! Loved watching your playthrough - Thanks for dedicating some time to playing our game. You ran into a lot of the same difficulties others have ran into regarding the clarity and feedback of some coffee-making mechanics, thank you for your kind words!
麦ふぁー やばい客しかいない
This "wheat fan" guy understands perfectly.First time around, I thought I was supposed to click on EXIT to continue, and didn’t think ‘proceed’ was clickable. I ended up at the main menu instead. Art style is nice. No volume sliders but the sounds aren’t too intrusive either. I had some issues with the Cappuccino minigame, since despite ramming my mouse up and down it’d sometimes still take like 20 to 30 seconds.
You can just click once on the coffee machine instead of holding it and it appears to just finish regardless of how long you held it down for. The game broke on day 3 after failing the customer during the cappuccino minigame. I can’t serve the drink or see any customers, and the espresso image is on the right half of my screen when I’m at the main counter.
Thanks for the feedback/bug reports!
>the espresso image is on the right half of my screen
...goddamnit i thought i fixed that.
The music for this game is very well done. Slow, easygoing, and quite fitting for the atmosphere of a coffee shop.
The art is also nice and there are a few funny visual gags around the shop. (It seems our main character may have two left hands judging from the intro sequence. Perhaps this is another reason for being jealous of Jerry.)
On the gameplay side things are quite confusing (with a lot of text that's hard to read in a small window to play the game in). The brewing mechanic has red and orange indicators on the bar that fills up when you press 'Q' but for the life of me I haven't been able to figure out what this is for (no other buttons seem to stop it; I was under the impression I was trying to stop the brew on one of those colors). I'm told to click and hold after brewing to fill the cup but it seems I can do this with 'R' as well (I only found this out through experimenting). Additionally, it seems I can tap 'R' or just click to serve a minimally filled coffee with no penalty.
All of the mechanics I encountered seemed to boil down to just pressing or holding a key. For me this was not engaging. I can see the vision behind it, but I think there should be more elements added to spice the gameplay up (i.e. timing mechanics, turn it into a slower-paced Guitar (Coffee!) Hero, allow multi-tasking so I can brew one coffee somewhere and another elsewhere while waiting on one, etc.).
At night I was told to hover my cursor over some icons while pressing the "ZXCV" buttons (If these two modes are separate they should both use "QWER"). I tried to press the corresponding buttons, but nothing seemed to happen or progress. I tried to get to the ritual casting part again going through the game another time, but ended up at a screen of the coffee place at night where none of my controls worked anymore.
While there are is a lot wrong with the gameplay of this game, I do appreciate the effort. There was a vision here, and while not fully realized I don't think it's something to give up on. Keep up the work and I hope you can either turn this into a better game or use what you've learned here for future endeavors! Making video games is a difficult thing, so it's still really cool that you were able to make this (especially being given only two weeks)!
This game is visually stunning, the details in the environment are amazing, and the banner tho ahahahahha ! Every little thing around the workplace is amazing!
The evolving gameplay really shakes things up, and acting magic to improve the shop at night is genius! GG!
Love this! The art and story is really charming and silly, and the spell section was interesting! I was a tad confused at first but finishing the spell made me feel like I actually casted some forgotten magics haha
Glad you liked it! Yeah we tweaked some of the instructions on the night rituals until the very end - they could use some work but the fact that it was rewarding for you is a huge compliment! Thank you for spending some of your time playing our game.
Great potential. Felt like the main sequence was a bit too long and the goal a bit too high to reach. I enjoyed the spells, especially the good effect / bad effect it gave. Would've have love to have a game more focused on that though.
Very cool artistic direction, love the characters.
Congrats !
Fleshing out the night phase was, ironically, sacrificed to meet the timeline. We'd also wanted for your sorcery to attract cultists that you'd have to shoo away with a broom.
Glad you enjoyed it though!
It's difficult to prioritize what to focus on in these kind of projects, with such short deadlines ! Making the most fun out of an idea is the hardest thing to do.
You did a good job anyway :)
Very fun and cozy game, i love the art. The controls are a bit clunky but it's a solid 10 from me.
Very chill experience. Good time and great art. As a former barista, this game really gets the "Manager scheduled me by myself for the slow shift and the church trip bus just pulled up" vibe.
Fun game idea and great art style
"it doesn't mean what you think" lmao
Love a good coffee and magic theme! Art looks great too! Good job