Edison Li
Meow Meow Barista Pitch
Unreleased
WIP
Meow Meow Barista (MMB) is a narrative driven cafe game, where an orange Maine Coon named Pumpkin does his best trying to run his owner's cafe. There is just one problem however, Pumpkin doesn't quite understand the human language.
Teammates
Narrative designer - Elayne Mason
Artist - Arabella Loveridge
Designer
I served as the primary gameplay designer for Meow Meow Barista, where my responsibilities included conceptualizing and crafting innovative mechanics for the game. My role extended to synthesizing the creative contributions of my artist and writer, to be presented during Shark Tank—an integral component of our Game Design curriculum at IU.
Pitch Deck
Cozy Cat Cafe
2000 New York
Dialogue Puzzle
Coffee Brewing
Pixel art
Lo-fi music
Release Date:
Feb, 2025
Pumpkin
Pumpkin left hungry one night, wished upon a shooting star
Blessed by the stars, he gain to ability to make his own food
But his owner got sick, so Pumpkin decide to help run the café in her stead
Pumpkin does not understand the human language
Major Selling points
Our dialogue puzzles are a twist on traditional dialogue systems, in which we have hidden our customer's dialogue text and the player's response. The coffee brewing and cat cafe aesthetic is chosen specifically to hone into our cozy atmosphere.
Dialogue Puzzle
All of the customer dialogues and Pumpkin's response are blocked out. Pumpkin has a set amount of reveals which they can use to delete one of the white blocks hidings the words within the dialogue.
Punctuation and word length are the only hints provided for the players. Punctuation helps break up the sentence topics and structure. It also aids the Pumpkin in choosing the correct responses. Word length can help player's fill in the blanks between revealed words. Often longer words convey more meaning to the sentence.
Coffee Brewing
After Pumpkin figured out the coffee order, they will proceed to the coffee brewing stage. The coffee brewing process consist of selecting the correct size and ingredients.
Through the dialogue and puzzle interaction, Pumpkin will figure out the recipe for coffee by referring to a recipe that would be displayed within a recipe book.
Shopping Mechanic
Using the money in coffee making, Pumpkin can go on Meow Bay to purchase new ingredients and equipment's for coffee brewing. Both upgrades will yield Pumpkin with more revenue. New recipes will entice more customers to come in. Better equipment's will boost the quality of coffee, allowing Pumpkin to charge more for his coffee.
Gifts and Decorations
Gifts and decorations are the way Pumpkin can gain more reveals. Gifts are one time use items that grants a temporary bonus reveals. Decorations in the cafe offers more permanent reveals for customer's that takes a liking to them.
Every customer can have up to 3 gifts. If the customer likes the gift Pumpkin will gain more reveals. If the customer dislikes the gift, Pumpkin will not gain any reveals, and a gift slot will be filled.
Decorations can be scattered across the cafe, there were no concept art for those decorations. Therefore please imagine if the cats and the gifts are decors instead.
The Journey
Dev Logs
Coffee Miro
MMB Notion
Language Miro
Week 1
Research
For the first week on the project, I researched for games that emulated the experience that we were trying to aim for. We wanted to bring the aesthetic of coffee talk into the likeable characters in Vall-Hall-A. Another pillar of ours was to reward the players more for their drink making.
Drink Crafting Board Game
From my research, the first thing we aim to prototype was a simple drink making mini game for MMB. Therefore I designed a game about blindly making drinks. Customers do not order by naming the drink, instead player has to create a drink based of a description of a incoming customer. Each ingredient had a hidden attribute that changed the flavor of the drink. Each customer has a specific preference for their drinks
Drinks can come in 3 different sizes, and main ingredients are composed of water, milk, and coffee. Syrups are added to help the player's better adapt to the customer preferences.
Week 2
After the announcement of Unity runtime fee, our group decided to explore Unreal Engine 5 to see if it is a viable engine for our game. This weeks goal was for me to get comfortable within the engine, and mess with UE5 user interface toll called widget. As a test, I made two prototyped game within UE5
Drink Crafting
This is a digital version of our drink making board. The player can now add ingredients to the drink, but every other calculation such as the customer preference was still hand computed by me.
Matching Game
Moving on from drink making, the player will be presented with a cat. The player now has to choose the best suitor for this cat based off the previous interactions with the customer.
Week 3
Drink Recipes
From the last two weeks, one of the most common feedback was the ambiguity and simplicity of the drink making. Since all drinks felt the same, the players often were left confused if they succeeded or failed. This was largely due to my lack of knowledge on coffee making at the time.
This week I designed combinations of different types of coffee that the players can make with their ingredients.
Week 4
By now we have finalized our pitch idea, and were pursing the challenge of making a game around a cat that doesn't understand the human language. Underneath are different ideas that I conceptualize for the dialogue puzzle mechanics using screenshots from Coffee Talk.
Click to Reveal
My first instinct was to block out the words within the dialogues, therefore the players will understand a fixed part of the interaction. This is emulating the feeling of speaking to a foreigner and you understanding every 3rd or fifth word.
Iconography
Another possible idea was using hieroglyphics, similar to Chants of Sennaar and building your vocab around the people you meet in your coffee shop.
Progression
Example of how each different dialogue puzzles will play out.
Pre - Pitch Video
Game Play Video
Week 5
This is the week around shark tank and where I spent the majority of my time editing and pitching our pitch deck. Underneath are the possible mechanics that we could've implemented to spice up the dialogue puzzles.
Expensive Words
A simple concept of making bigger words more expensive, this can help players locate important words within the sentence. Longer words typically convey more within a sentence, but since they cost more now players have to decide whether or not revealing all the long words are the best or is it better to understand the context of the long words.
Upgrades
Many people speak differently and often have recognizable patterns to their speech. These patterns may show up more commonly in some customers than others.
We can also take a different approach and make these be possible upgrades for Pumpkin to obtain. Marking repeating words, or make one word unlock a chain of words can make the puzzles more friendly towards the players.
Revealing Dialogue Tree
Having preset dialogue feels a little unnatural for Pumpkin to bring up. This iteration makes revealing words the main focus, and takes away the response mechanic. Each word is tied to a dialogue route, finding the correct words will unlock that specific dialogue interactions.
