Rose: For someone who has never heard of your game, how would you
describe it without using the usual genre labels?
You run a cafe where nobody tells you their order. People sit down
and talk about their day instead. A woman mentions she has been
cold since the bus stop. A man says he has two hours to finish
something and cannot afford to slow down. You listen, you work out
what would actually help, and you put it in front of them.
That is the whole thing. You are not running a kitchen or beating a
clock. You are paying attention to people, and then acting on what you
noticed.
Rose: Where did the idea for this game come from?
The idea itself came from a thing I keep noticing about people, which is that we almost never say what we actually want. We talk around it. We mention the weather, or how the week has gone, and the real request sits just underneath, and we quietly hope the other person picks it up. I found that far more interesting than any timer or inventory. A cafe was the obvious place to put it, because a cafe is exactly where people say those things out loud over a snack or a coffee maybe.
Rose: What makes your game different from other games in the same
space?
Deduction games almost always hand you something cold. A crime scene, a case file, the last hours of a man who is already dead. You reconstruct what happened to people who are not there. Cafe Sapa hands you a person who is sitting right in front of you, and the answer is not an accusation; it is a bowl of soup. Solving somebody is an act of care rather than an indictment. The other difference is that the regulars come back. What you learn about someone carries into the next night, the characters remember what you served them last time. And there are no timers, so you can sit with a line as long as you like, but your serves are limited, which means a careless read still costs you something. That combination is the bit I am proudest of.
Rose: Was there anything you had to cut that you still secretly wish you
could put back?
I cut the original game and I never deleted it. The first version had almost no dialogue. Every customer carried a mood, one of Calm, Stressed, Hungry, Cold or Comfort, and the system turned that mood straight into an item. Cold became soup, Stressed became coffee. It worked instantly, which was the problem. Once you learned the five pairs there was nothing left to read. That system is still sitting underneath the game right now, holding the structure up and deciding absolutely nothing. I could have stripped it out. I have not, and I do not entirely want to. Maybe I’ll introduce it in the full version of the game and expand a bit on it. It can be a minigame of it’s own within the game.
Rose: What is something players probably won't realize took an absurd
amount of work?
Making the text fit inside the speech bubble. That sounds like a joke and it is not. The dialogue is the mechanic, so it has to be comfortably readable, which means a decent font size. But the bubbles are drawn art that sits in a hand made scene, so they cannot just grow to whatever size they like without wrecking the composition. Too small and people squint. Too large and the bubble swallows the character. Auto sizing the text produced its own problem where the font would shrink and quietly stay shrunk for the rest of the night. I lost days to this. There were evenings where I fixed the bubble for the normal guests and broke it for the boss, fixed the boss and broke the tutorial, fixed the tutorial and broke the cutscenes. Nobody will ever notice it works. They would have noticed immediately if it did not.
Rose: What is the weirdest bug you've encountered that you almost
wanted to keep?
I changed how one of the interface layers was drawn, and every reaction emoji in the game started launching itself toward the bottom left corner of the screen and disappearing off the edge. So you would read a guest correctly, serve exactly the right thing, and their little burst of happiness would immediately hurl itself out of the room. The serve counter icon did it too. The whole cafe looked like it was throwing its feelings out of the window. It was completely wrong for a cozy game and I laughed every single time it happened. I fixed it, obviously. I was a little sad about it.
Rose: Is there a particular emotion you wanted players to walk away with
from your game?
The feeling of having been understood by somebody who was paying
attention. Not pride at solving something, although that is in there. I mean the specific warmth of someone noticing what you needed before you managed to ask for it. Most of us get that far less often than we would like. I wanted to build the other side of it. You are the one doing the noticing, for a whole room of people, all night. If somebody finishes a shift feeling like they were good to a few strangers, that is the entire point of the game as far as I am concerned.
Rose: What's one piece of advice you wish you'd had before starting?
Find out what your game actually is much earlier than feels comfortable. I spent real months polishing a system that turned out not to be the game. The mood table worked, it was clean, I was pleased with it, and it was the wrong idea. The actual game only appeared when I moved the truth out of the code and into the writing, and I should have got there months sooner than I did. The uncomfortable part is that you usually cannot think your way to it. You have to build the wrong version first and be honest with yourself the moment it stops being interesting. Being honest with yourself is the hard skill. The engineering is the easy bit.
Rose: Five years from now, what do you hope people remember about
this game?
A character, not a mechanic. I would be delighted if someone five years from now could not tell you a single rule of Cafe Sapa but still remembered Gritz, or remembered the night a guest walked in from the cold and they got it right first time. Systems fade. People remember who they met. And if anybody ever says it made them a slightly better listener, I will take that over any review score.
Rose: Why should someone reading/watching this go play your game
today?
Honestly, today you cannot. The demo goes out in February 2027 during Steam Next Fest. What you can do today is watch the trailer and put it on your wishlist, and I am aware how much that sounds like every other developer asking for the same thing. So here is the honest version. Wishlists are the only signal Steam gives a game like mine, and they decide whether it gets shown to anyone at all in February. If the idea of a cafe where nobody says what they want does something for you, that one click genuinely matters more than it should.
Rose: Can you officially confirm that your game is, in fact, probably a
game?
I can confirm it is probably a game, and I am prepared to defend that. It has a win condition, a fail condition, and a number that goes up when you are good at it. You press buttons. Things happen because you pressed them. There is a boss in the demo. He is the Mayor. The case against is that there is no timer, nobody dies, and the central skill is listening to somebody talk about their morning. If that disqualifies it, then I have accidentally made a very elaborate empathy simulator with a soup mechanic, and I am at peace with that outcome.