Hi everyone!

Welcome to our very first devlog, and with it, we're excited to announce that Spicy Scales is officially being developed into a full game!

After receiving such positive feedback and hearing so many great ideas during the GTMK Game Jam, we decided to continue developing Spicy Scales to make it an even more enjoyable experience for all of you.

Wait, what’s Spicy Scales?

If you haven’t played our game before (you totally should), here's the gist: you play as a spice merchant, selling spices to customers by weighing them on your scales. The closer you get to the exact weight, the higher the profit. Sounds a bit too easy, right? Well, there’s a twist - the weights you have are beyond your control, making it tricky to balance the scales perfectly.

Impatient customers, ever-rising rent, and even robbers attacking you at night - all while you're on the move. Make life decisions, balancing risk and reward, as you strive to keep your business afloat. Managing all of this without going bankrupt is the core challenge of Spicy Scales.

So, what's new?

During the GTMK Game Jam, several design choices were made to create a short but enjoyable experience. However, a game that short won't keep y'all engaged for long - so, we’re expanding it!

The map

The town featured in the current version is just one of many! As a traveling spice merchant, you’ll be going from town to town, selling your selection of spices to new customers.

After spending a few days in each town selling spices, you’ll move on to avoid letting your business grow stagnant. The map has branching paths, so it's all up to you to choose the best route for maximizing your sales.

Unique towns

While the main mechanic of weighing spices is fun, doing the same thing repeatedly would eventually get boring. That’s why towns you visit will keep introducing different gameplay mechanics. Some will be straightforward, like the town you can experience in the browser version, while others will be more complex - imagine a bustling bazaar where you have to serve multiple impatient customers at once.

Maybe, in some towns, you might not even be able to see the true weight of the spices you’re selling, making it even harder to get an accurate measure. And there’s plenty more surprises we won’t spoil just yet~

Customers

We received a few reviews mentioning that you could wait way too long without customers losing their patience, even when they say they’re short on time. That’s about to change! Now, each customer will have their own patience meter, and if you take too long trying to weigh everything perfectly, it will impact your sales and reputation.

Customers will be overhauled greatly - they will vary in generosity and patience, and some may even offer mini-quests for you to complete - for a reward, of course!

Spices

The theme of our game, of course! In the browser version you buy spices continuously, with saffron being the final one. However, since there will be many towns and branching paths, it makes sense for the variety of spices to expand as well!

During your travels, you'll encounter and buy all sorts of unique spices - some of which you have never heard of! Each spice will have different buffs, turning your spice collection into a bit of a deck-building experience. We plan to make some spices easily purchasable in shops, while others - the rarer, juicier ones - will be earned as rewards for completing quests.

What's next?

This is just the beginning of our journey! Expect even more news from us here on itch.io and on our Discord: https://discord.gg/AUq3H8awsc

While we’ll post major devlogs on itch.io, we share more frequent news and updates on Discord, so be sure to join us there!