Hi everyone,
Here again with another devlog. This one took a lot longer than anticipated, but I’ve got a lot to show off.
Back in Trouble Brewing, I finished the early implementation of the brewing system, allowing you to take physical ingredients and load them into flasks and barrels.
Open for Business tackles the main gameplay-loop from the other direction. In this update, I focused on the shop-keeping aspect, to allow you to actually do something with those brews.
Steam Page
I’m happy to announce that the Flask & Barrel Steam Page is now live. You can head there now to wishlist Flask & Barrel!
The Flask & Barrel Shop
With that out of the way, let’s jump right in. I’m happy to present, the Flask & Barrel shop!
Like the brewery, the shop is a little bigger on the inside than the outside, and features 2 floors. The lower floor, with the kitchen and apartment area, and the top floor with the customer-facing shop.
The apartment will be an early game area where the player will get the simple basics of brewing. It is also where you will go to sleep and end your day.
The shop is a large open area where you can place a variety of furniture items to attract customers. These new furniture items will all be place-able in the shop and brewery, (though we’re currently lacking a full building mode right now!).
The shop and the brewery are mysteriously connected. The door behind the counter allows the player to quickly hop back and forth between the two.
Once per game day, you can open the shop! With the shop open, customers will occasionally wander in and purchase things off the shelves. This is a mostly a passive source of income, and you’re encouraged to keep those shelves nicely stocked!
Shelves are user place-able. I envision a large variety of different shelves, displays, and vanity items to decorate the shop with as we grow.
Customers are randomized, with random names and brief dialogue options. At the moment, they’re all setup as various other NPCs that you’ve seen before. Eventually these will eventually be replaced by more “generic” customers.
These customers are mostly self-reliant, not much interaction is needed to close the deal. But some of them may have questions for you about the shop, certain brews, etc. Helping these customers out helps you be seen as a welcoming shop and will improve your shops rating! This is pretty bare bones right now, but as things progress, I think this will add a lot of personality to the various customers out there.
Occasionally, a customer will instead come to the counter. These customers will ring the service bell, which you can hear from the brewery so you know to head out there right away. These customers would like to place an order, your primary source of income.
These orders can be accessed via a new object, the Order Board, located just behind the counter. This board shows your 8 most time-sensitive orders, and a quick glance at the details of them all.
You can open up these orders, where you’ll find a slot that lets you put in flasks and fulfill orders. These orders are a lot more valuable than selling individual items at the shop.
It should be noted that fulfilling orders doesn’t require an exact match. Maybe a rude customer gets a weak brew. Or, maybe you get a little bonus for providing a strong version instead.
There aren’t any consequences to not accepting orders — sometimes you’re just too busy. But, accepting an order and then not fulfilling is definitely not good for your reputation!
Right now, when an order is done, that’s it. In the future, I’d like the customer to come back and pick it up on the day its done. This will be taken care of in a later update, where we dive into second half of the order process: delivery. That will be handled post-alpha. For now, we’re just focused on getting that shop open!
Speaking of open, to open the shop you can press the open button during “business hours”. These are defined as any time between 9 AM and 5 PM. At 5 PM, the shop will close automatically. You can only open the shop once per day, so think carefully about your schedule for the day!
After a day of hard work, you’ll be met with the new Daily Report menu.
As the system expands more and more, this will include more information that is useful to your progress. Stats like your overall shop rating which helps determine your success.
Brewing Changes, Much More Variety
Most of these changes are a bit hidden from this blog. But the gist of it is that brewing now mimics real life brewing more closely. All ingredients have a natural sugar content: brix. When something is cooked up in the kettle, the kettle uses the primary ingredient (the most numerous, or most valuable) to determine what the output liquid should be (grains -> wort, vegetables -> mash, etc). This hasn’t changed much since last time we talked about it.
What has changed is that now the total, combined brix of all ingredients determines the brix of the output liquid.
Now when fermenting, you need to select a yeast suitable for the sugar content of your liquid. Rather than yeast + category = new category, your outputs are less dependent on the strain, and more on the brix. Yeasts have a maximum proof that they can achieve, before they are no longer effective. So more sugar doesn’t always mean higher proof!
This gives you a lot more yeast selection. In the later game will let me break away from these current rigid names and focus on fun strains of yeast with new properties. New quirks like like high alcohol tolerance, or high efficiency conversion. Eventually I’d like these to have their scientific yeast name (e.g. S. Cerevisiae) and fun unique properties that make them all fill their niche.
This also means that you can supplement brews. Adding grains with a low sugar content, like rye, may not be enough to ferment into a Wash. But if you add some honey, raw sugar, or berries, that might boost you up just enough!
Quality of Life
You may have noticed in earlier images, but there is now an official mouse cursor, and not pictured here is the array of other cursor icons available that all come up during certain situations.
The biggest quality of life change is the overhaul of the character models and directional movement system.
There is now true 8 directional movement with the introduction of a straight up and straight down animation for the character that looks much more natural. This extends to all animations, including idling and rolling barrels. Base models have also been adjusted to add some more character
What’s Brewing?
Next up is an update I’ve been excited about for a while now, v0.12.0 – Pipe Dream. This will be an expansion to the brewing system allowing you to place pipes of different colors throughout your brewery. You’ll be able to develop easier brewing workflows to maximize profits as the game progresses. Pipe Dream will include some new locations and characters who will help you source your brewing machines, equipment, and accessories.
Alpha Release Roadmap
I’d like to start including this road map in every blog. Maybe before the full release we can go back and see how many times I was off by several months….
v0.11.0 – Open for Business Q2 2025 Complete: Q3 2025
v0.12.0 – Pipe Dream ~Q4 2025
- Boiler and Power System
- Plumbing system
- Brewing system polish
- New Locations + Characters
v0.13.0 – Trade Winds ~Q1 2026
- Vendors
- More consistent sound and music
- Asset expansion
- QoL Improvements
Alpha v1.0.0 – Cleaning Up ~Q2 2026
- Shop cleaning mechanic
- Content expansion
- New items, dialogue, brewing machines, NPCs
- Bug Fixes
- Balancing
You’ll notice I’m not shifting things back too far. A lot of the time behind these updates is expected to be from having to create all the assets. Part of the big delay in this update was taking a long pause to focus solely on asset creation. There will be much more to show off about this in v0.12.0, but just know that one should be a bit quicker!
If all goes well, I plan to have a early copy in playtester’s hands around the end of 2025, which should really help accelerate the process.
Wishlist Flask & Barrel on Steam!
Thanks for reading!
Nick
Flask & Barrel 