Hello, this our first official dev blog post at Acute Owl Studio. I’ve never made a blog post before so bare with me here…

On 4/8/2022 at 7am PST Tim and I pressed the “Release game” button together to release our first game, Bone’s Cafe in early access on steam. I was super nervous, excited, and very tired from working overdrive the past few days. We have been doing a terrible job at marketing the game, so I did not expect many sales or attention. But… the launch has been going much better than I expected. Since launch, our out standing wishlists has grown from 500+ to over 1000+ and as of right now, we have 199 copies of the game sold! I had expected to maybe sell 5-10 copies if I was lucky, so this is a big surprise.

Bone’s Cafe has been receiving positive attention from streamers and game news websites. Stumpt has started streaming the game on their multiplayer twitch stream, which is absolutely awesome, especially for Tim because he has been a long time fan of theirs. Bone’s Cafe also received positive reviews from PCGamer and Rock Paper Shotgun. All of this is super exciting and unexpected.

Now the “new launch” dust has settled and we had some R&R, we’re getting back to work on the game. We’re planning to fully release the game in October 2022 and look into releasing it on the Switch in December 2022.

We first started working on Bone’s Cafe in January 2021 when we decided to make a prototype of the game. Since then we worked on the game on and off until July 2021 when I decided to quit my fulltime job as a software engineer to pursue being a indie game developer and work on Bone’s Cafe fulltime. This is a very scary decision to make, because game development is very hard to make money from, but I had enough savings to take a chance. Tim has been working on the project part time since about August 2021, but he might switch to fulltime now to help me.

For the curious, Bone’s Cafe was made in Unity and we used Photoshop and Piskel to make the art assets. We chose a 2D pixel style because neither of us are artists and thought that this is the only art style we might be able to handle.

The original pitch for Bone’s Cafe: “Overcooked/Diner bros style gameplay that will eventually result in buying robots to automate tasks for you. You will also be able to upgrade and define the layout of your kitchen.”

Let me know if you enjoyed this blog post or have any feedback or requests for future posts. You can join our discord server in the top right corner of the page to get in contact with us easily.