Hi everyone,

This week I've been working on fixing up a few problems that have been getting in the way for a while, so there's no major new features to talk about.

The biggest improvement is that customers now have an "eating" phase after they receive their meals. Previously, they used to instantly leave once they've been given all their food, but now they'll eat the food first. I was worried this would cause some balance problems, because they're still there clogging up your tables (very inconsiderately) and there's not much you can do about it, but I can see how it goes and tweak things accordingly. This also opens things up for balance that affects how long people take to eat; perhaps you can have a restaurant with customers that take a very long time to eat. That might be a bad thing if you're going for fast food, but if it gives you a breather in between courses, maybe it's what you're after!



I've also fixed a long-running problem with how the game works out where people can sit. Previously, it was possible to start the game without big enough tables (i.e. starting the game with only 1-person tables when your restaurant will get groups of 2). Obviously this made it impossible to serve those groups and they'd just loiter outside, queuing for a table that doesn't exist until they made you lose (again, very inconsiderate). The game is now able to work out how many people a table can sit during the design stage, including ignoring inaccessible chairs, and will not let you start if you haven't got a big enough table.

I've implemented the game's saving and loading systems. Thankfully, because of the way the game is structured, this is remarkably seamless and the game will happily save and load at any point, including during restaurants (although I'm not sure that will be allowed in the final game, for various reasons). I ran into a few bugs setting this up – at first, the game autosaved when you returned to your headquarters, but loading these saves caused the code that sets up the HQ to be run continually. Because one of the jobs of that code is to create your pet cats, the HQ would rapidly fill with infinitely many cats. Very un-fur-tunate. With that fixed, the game is ready to autosave as intended!

Those are the major changes to report for this week. I've also been working on improving the UI, tweaking the difficulty and fixing a few situations where you could accidentally buy things if you pressed the wrong button (and spent a long time wondering why I couldn't buy anything before realising I didn't have enough money).