This is another Facebook game similar to other farm-tending games like Farmville, Farmtown and Country Story. I just thought of checking it out after seeing a friend's post about it. The very first thing that came to mind was that it looks and feels a lot like Ranch Rush of Yahoo!, although there isn't any character that you order around to do jobs. Games like these are already so common in Facebook that the developers didn't even bother setting up a tutorial. Speaking of developers, I am still checking out who they are, because they don't seem like from Playfish or Zynga.
Some of the features of the game:
1. No more crops going bad if not harvested. I thought I won't be playing the game for long since the first crop you can plant, Clover, matures in four hours. Which is quite fast for a casual player that only gets to check Facebook once or twice in a day, even if it goes bad at the same rate that it ripens. But turns out it doesn't spoil, even after I visited the game several days later.
2. There are a couple of machines that you can use to process crops you harvest. For starters, you get to use a cheese machine to process milk that you get from feeding clover to cows. Then there's the ketchup machine, the flour mill, and a chicken coop. They just introduced rabbits, but I don't exactly know yet what they are supposed to produce.
3. Crops, animals, and machines can actually be gifted to you by friends who already reached a certain level to be qualified to gift them. You will also need a certain number of friends to become your neighbors for you to be able to expand your ranch (or you can shell out some real cash for it).
The game do require that you spend a considerable amount of time feeding animals, planting or processing harvests. More so than you would playing, say, Cafe World. But I guess that's the game design and it's fairly reasonable.
That's it for now. I am pretty new in the game, but I will try to update on this as I go along.
Just a quick follow up on what I've been learning about Cafe World. These include friend visits, renovations, and use of friend gifts.
Friendship Has Its Limits
I mentioned before that friend visits will allow you to earn xp points and coins at least once a day. But I thought back then that the xp and coins you will earn will depend on the level of your friend. Turns out it's a random thing. Even a level 1 friend can give you 5 xp and 20 coins, the highest I have seen so far. The reverse can happen as well, with a high level friend only giving you 1 xp and 5 coins. Looks reasonable to me, otherwise you will end up leveling primarily because of your friends' efforts. I think it's also one way to remedy the abuse of adding "temp" friends like what people have been doing at Restaurant City. If somehow you end up getting only a limited number of maximum rewards for friend visits, it doesn't really pay to add too many people when you will only earn 1xp every visit.
Renovate Carefully
Be careful in renovating when the equipment you are about to remove from your resto has something on it or you are using it. I lost an entire batch of one day's worth of cooking totaling 4,000 servings (or 16,000 coins @ 4 coins per serving) when I removed the serving table carrying the serving and replaced it with an upgraded serving table. All the while I thought the servings will be retained, since when I replaced a dirty stove with a higher model stove, the new one also ended up being dirty. I guess that's not the way the game is designed, where you lose valuable things without even being prompted. But since the game is in beta, it's really a case of renovate at your own risk. Also, try to minimize going in and out of the renovate mode, since it appears that the customers you have are reset when you go out of renovate mode, which means you lose out on those that were seated when you started renovating.
Maximize Your Gifts
You can maximize the use of friend gifts (those drinks they send you) if you use them when your tables are all full. However, if you happen to be like me who visit Cafe World only once a day, you may not expect to see a high popularity rating when you log in because the servings by then and it would have been a waste of resources to invest in so many tables and chairs when I know many of them will be non-earning perhaps half of the time. However, I am reserving the gifts for that golden moment when I can be online when my popularity is going up and I can supply as much tables and chairs as needed to keep up with the demand. Then I should use those gifts when I perceive that the maximum number of diners possible has been reached. Hopefully the waiting would be worth it. And hopefully that day would come.
Zynga recently launched Cafe World, it's very own game to match the other restaurant games in Facebook. The game has the same look and feel as Restaurant City. And perhaps that's really the intention, because they are the only ones in the same category among cafe/ restaurant game types in Facebook. However, it has some significant differences from each other.
I have just started in the game, but let me share some of the things I've been learning so far. I've also included some comparison to Restaurant City which I have noticed so far.
Objective of the Game
You start off as the chef of your own cafe. The objective is managing a cafe operation, making it profitable so that you can purchase items to make your restaurant as unique and eye-catching as possible. Leveling is an integral part of the game, which unlocks certain features of the game when you reach certain levels. These include being able to have more choices in what to cook and option to hire more friends as cafe staff. You acquire cafe points, which is the level up unit of the game everytime you accomplish some tasks, such as cooking food and cleaning up the stoves you used for cooking. The dishes you cook earn you coins as they are served by your crew. You use the coins to buy more ingredients to cook your dishes (explained below) and to upgrade and decorate your cafe. Dishes continue to be served by your waiters as long they have been moved to the serving counter, even when you are offline.
The leveling process is different in Restaurant City, where the Gourmet Points used in leveling is earned as part of serving the dishes. And there is also the requirement in Restaurant City that the browser window you are using should be active (meaning, open on top of all other browsers, otherwise you only earn the coins and not the Gourmet Points). In Cafe World, the Cafe Points is earned as part of your activity in cooking, cleaning stoves, and serving the dishes, as well as the occasional hiring of cafe crew. What's similar is that you have to be active in both cases in somewhat different manner, otherwise you don't level up. And in the case of Cafe World, you don't even get coins if you don't cook since you have to manually prepare the dishes and move them to the serving tables before your crew can serve them to the customers and get paid for it.
Preparing Dishes
You prepare a dish by purchasing the necessary ingredients as provided for in the cookbook. However, you don't purchase ingredients individually, but collectively for the dish you intend to cook. This means no need to be looking for ingredients from friends as in Restaurant City. Ingredients in the preparation of dishes are purchased using the game's gold system, and are always available.
Each purchase of ingredients to cook a dish will yield a certain number of servings, where dishes with shorter cooking time having less servings compared to dishes with longer cooking time. Cooking times can be as fast as 5 minutes to as long as 48 hours. So there's really a dish for everyone, whether you are a 24/7 online player or an occasional Facebook user that can log on only for several times (or even just once) during the day. Certain dishes also yields different amounts of income, but the main difference in the amount that you will earn per batch is really in the number of servings per batch. Basically, the more active you are in the game, the more you will earn. Which only stands to reason. But of course, that also means a great deal more effort. To illustrate concretely, you will earn FOUR TIMES MORE serving cheeseburgers that cooks every 5 minutes against a spit-roasted chicken which cooks for 24 hours. However, with the cheeseburger, you will have to be checking your cafe every 10 minutes since dishes spoil at the same amount of time as the cooking time, as against checking your chicken once a day or even less since it won't spoil until after the 2nd day from cooking. This means that unless you can play for at least six hours a day, you are better off just cooking the chicken rather than the cheeseburgers.
Unlike in Restaurant City, dishes are not leveled up in Cafe World since it operates under a different set of playing conditions. Since I am a casual player that only gets to check my Facebook at night during weekdays, I can only serve the chicken or the roast beef, since they have 24-hour and 48-hour cooking times, respectively. But I tend to serve only the chicken since it will yield more income for me. Hopefully as I level up I will have access to additional dishes that have the same cooking time as the chicken, so I can serve more varied meals.
Hiring Cafe Crew
Like in Restaurant City, you start off by hiring one of your friends as a crew or waiter.
This also does not require their acceptance. You get to hire more crew as you level up.
Miscellaneous
You can also gain Cafe Points and coins by visiting your friends. Unlike Restaurant City where it only pays to visit your friend once, your first visit to a friend for a given day will allow you to get Cafe Points and coins, the amount of which depends on the level of your friend. And you can visit the next day and get the same benefits again.You can purchase upgrades of furniture and equipment to make your cafe look better. You can expand your cafe by buying a larger floor area also from the in-game shop.
The number of customers you will have on a given amount of time will depend on the popularity of your cafe, which is basically the same as with Restaurant City. But since the dishes are prepared somewhat differently, I find no real incentive in closing the cafe when I go offline, even if it would mean losing popularity points. You will get to understand it when you start playing.
There is currently no player rating feature. Hopefully it will have one soon. Not sure if they have a messaging system in place as well.
That's it for now. I will post more about this game as I progress. Let me know if you discovered something as well.
More Cafe World posts here.
