Coffee Talk Has Become a Quiet Success in a Turbulent Year

It’s the one-year anniversary of players creating custom drinks and having conversations with vampires, werewolves, and more in this narrative-driven game.

The premise of Coffee Talk is simple. It takes place at night within a coffee shop in Seattle. As the constant rain pours down, a variety of customers—mostly regulars—order hot drinks and lament their personal concerns. A reporter worries about deadlines. A couple fights about what their family thinks of their relationship. A mermaid from Atlantis struggles to obtain a US visa for her research work in computer graphics technology. A police officer hopes no one notices he’s taking extended breaks. A hospital admissions officer notes a spreading virus.

Coffee Talk—from Toge Productions, a video game developer based in Indonesia—was released on January 29 of last year, a little more than a month before the world began to go into Covid-related lockdown. The game quickly gained a devoted following with its easygoing gameplay, which features the user as the lone barista and café owner, whose only objectives are to make conversation and hot drinks.

Despite the game’s similarities to the real-world events of 2020, it had been in development for years. The idea originated at Toge’s annual Game Jam in 2017, a two-week-long internal creative session where all team members—even those not involved in development—could work on potential games.

That’s how Mohammad Fahmi, the game’s writer and designer, who at the time worked in marketing and PR for Toge, first pitched Coffee Talk—then titled Project Green Tea Latte.

“This might sound a bit dramatic,” Fahmi says, before describing how the idea came to him while listening to the rain late at night as he drank a hot green tea latte. “I thought, this is such a nice experience,” he says. “How can I emulate this experience into video games?”

Article taken from Wired.