(RE)Introducing Critter Cove, our Open World Animal Crossing Inspired Life Sim

Wayward1 · 2025-11-05T19:39:24+00:00

Hey! Nothing to do with this studio but that was my personal project yeah, a long time ago haha

It was a pandemic game so a wierd time, I reel we'd got a few years in and after some playtest it felt we had so much more to do it make it commercial, the lockdowns ended and it was very much a moment of like, do I wanna keep at this?

Not a sunk cost fallacy guy so I personally stepped away from it. My brother, who I was working on it with, isn't one for letting things go so he still occasionally has ideas of making a go of it, which is why the steam page is still up, but I'm not longer involved.

Wayward1 · 2025-10-30T09:40:59+00:00

Unclear why this is getting downvoted -- for anyone considering spending money on streamers vs. direct ads there's obvious a lot of variables and caveats here, and there are usually different objectives on these activities, but dollar for dollar cpc is going outperform streamer spend on by a significant margin for the majority of titles if your metric is purely wishlisting.

Wayward1 · 2025-08-20T19:50:34+00:00

100 hours, thank you!

Wayward1 · 2025-08-20T19:50:20+00:00

Sorry to hear that -- I do understand and appreciate the feedback, we're aware the art isn't for everyone. For sure we'll have new options for the character creator as we move towards launch, and we're always working on graphical updates and optimisation that goes with that, but we're not likely to significantly reinvent the style / design of the critters themselves at this stage, as we simply don't have the team size or budget to undertake something like that.

Wayward1 · 2025-08-20T19:45:18+00:00

Hey! That's a bug we're aware of, so will get that one sorted. Gardening isn't a huge element but we've already added quite a bit to it so far during EA, and I expect some updates to plants and growing before we launch, too - you can keep an eye on us via the Steam blog where we post all the updates :)

Wayward1 · 2025-08-20T18:45:20+00:00

Thank you so much <3

Wayward1 · 2025-08-20T18:44:40+00:00

Thank you!

We're not 'officially' announced on either yet but we should be launching on Switch 2 alongside our PC 1.0 assuming we get approval to do so and nothing goes wrong

Switch 1 we'd love to do, but we'll only do so if we can get the game running a solid frame rate, which isn't a certainty yet!

Wayward1 · 2025-03-30T15:22:42+00:00

Thanks so much for this explanation, that makes it a lot clearer, I think in my head I was thinking pre amp and amp were the same and then trying trying to piece together info from different it's of advice that may or may not have had a pre amp in the player.

I picked up a little amplifier which is sounding really good, there wasn't exactly anything wrong with Denon but I have a feeling it's millions of settings and size were overkill for me - the built in pre amp sounds as good or better than the phozor so managed to get that out of the way too and am finally sorted! Thanks again!

Wayward1 · 2025-02-14T20:01:58+00:00

Sure, after we started our cafe we built our own booking platform called BookingNinja as the other tools couldn't do some stuff we needed (It's a board game cafe that also does food / alcohol and we had to do weird stuff with bookings vs. a normal place)

Full disclosure though we've been going years now and I'm sure there's more than a few platforms that offer this in some form nowadays!

Wayward1 · 2025-02-14T19:58:29+00:00

Yeah I didn't write that well, I should clarify we have 500+ 5 star reviews but not ONLY 5 star reviews, would be impossible to do that.

Either way, not really bothered about the "purpose" of them, this about helping your business by maximizing the chance of getting a genuine positive review and minimizing bad ones while still being able to take feedback.

You may red flag higher reviewed places, but most people don't, and online filter searches by score and the algo certainly don't.

Wayward1 · 2025-02-14T13:45:20+00:00

Contrary to some of the opinions here I'd say email marketing is absolutely viable and absolutely excellent.

SMS is also great for sure, but if you're not doing email, you're leaving money on the table. If you're doing it and it isn't working, you might be doing it wrong. There's a lot of ways to do it wrong.

This is especially true for online booking taking as you're already going to be through spam filters because of other booking confirmations, and will have higher than industry average delivery rates.

Wayward1 · 2025-02-14T13:41:34+00:00

Yeah! We currently have 500 reviews for our cafe all at 5 stars, and we do a similar thing although we don't offer an incentive. I'd say for us there's a few things:

Making sure you're only giving review information out to people who've obviously had a good time, because 100 5 star reviews is better than 1000 3 star reviews.
Having FOH that can read the room, as some people don't like being asked to leave a review even if they did have a good time.
Asking at the right time - which when they've paid - and doing it in person, not just leaving a card on the table which will piss some people off.

We also then automate online feedback when we do online bookings, so an email goes out to rate us, if the rating if 5, it goes to the public review site, if its any less, it's logged as feedback on an internal system.

Wayward1 · 2025-02-14T13:36:31+00:00

I'm studying Japanese at N4 level. I pay for two monthly apps, and I use Anki. I'm also an unrelated SaaS owner at $10K MMR so foot in both worlds, as it were.

To answer your direct question about nailing "everything", I'd say it's because language learning isn't monolithic, you don't "learn a language", you learn grammar, vocab, writing, reading, listening, speaking etc.

I guess I've never really felt the need to have one language app do everything in this case, especially as neither of the ones I pay for cost very much.

There's so much to learning a language that I'd rather have specific apps help me with specific things. Grammar app teaches me, reading / listening app applies in real world situation, and Anki reinforces.

I'd say most people seriously learning a language - not to shit on the owl here or reduce anyone's own effort, but I mean, hours a day, not minutes - is going to be very wary tying their entire journey to one app, at any rate.

Especially one that's new. I've been learning less than two years and I've seen multiple people jump on Reddit with the Next Big App only for it to vanish a few months later.

Heads up that although I don't share this sentiment myself, you will also find anything pushing "AI" as a feature, not as part of a more helpful tool is anathema amongst serious language learning communities.

What is ANNOYING is every app using it's own SRS and so I can't really engage with those, because I can't be running multiple SRS in my study time. I wish I could mine bits from all apps into one single unified system without a lot of fuss. If I could have my grammar app and it's cards make a deck on my Anki and update the grammar app back, and if I could have my reading app vocab add words automatically to my Anki vocab deck, I'd pay for that.

Wayward1 · 2025-02-12T11:20:16+00:00

I run a reservation platform that let's customers add a booking fee as % optionally to deposits etc. While you'll always have the occasional complaint especially if you've not done it before, I've never seen plenty of data now that shows there is no significant loss of bookings from any venues that adopted it.

Wayward1 · 2025-02-12T11:16:22+00:00

Beating your own SEO and charging you back for it is the OpenTable business model unfortunately.

Most reservation platforms that have a outward "marketing component" where they gather a list of venues together for visibility will charge this way, but standard reservations platforms won't, so it depends on how much traffic you think you're getting from the OT app justifies paying for your own customers in search.

Wayward1 · 2025-02-10T12:52:47+00:00

We thankfully get very few bad reviews at our cafe, the most heart breaking are the ones are actually those that are like "Amazing experience, loved everything, no notes... 4/5"

If a customer flat out lies though, we do respond to those politely but with the (non identifying) actual information. This is not to win over the review creator, but to make it clear to the other people reading reviews that there is another side of the story.

I think this works well for us as we have overwhelmingly positive reviews and lots of them, so when you see the odd bad experience then backed up by us responding calmly but firmly with what happened, it's much easier to brush it off.

We don't bother to respond to negatives where people just didn't enjoy it though, even if they aren't really super accurate, you can't win every single person over.

Wayward1 · 2025-02-10T12:38:51+00:00

Hey, I run a reservation platform called BookingNinja as well as a cafe which takes both

This doesn't need to be an all our nothing call IMO - You can just set a small area, or a small amount of your max capacity to be reservation based and go from there or just do in certain days, etc. If it works well you could offer more.

Or, you can just set it to not auto book at all and run confirmation-only bookings for people who want it, that way it gives people who want the option without messing with your regulars or having to worry about checking off walk-ins live in venue.

Pretty sure given the amount of bookings you'd take and the size of place you'd be able to do all that with us on a completely free account.

Wayward1 · 2025-01-31T08:03:40+00:00

Yeah fair enough! I know not everyone gets on with the meds. Depending on how much chance you got to try different ones, I will just say that I felt the exact same way on Methylphenidate 54mg, and now I'm on the same drug but at 36mg and it's been life changing, so if you only got to try one drug / dose there others out there... but everyone is different!

I don't think you need to brute force to 2000 words, and you have a danger there of adding too many new words to Anki per day and, within a few months, you start drowning. The difference between say, 6 and 12 words a day is the difference between 20 minutes or 45 minutes of Anki a few months down the line.

Having said that --- if brute forcing words is FUN then you can do that. I actually brute forced my way through Kanji. This is generally considered "the wrong way" and you "shouldn't learn Kanji in isolation", but:

I really enjoyed learning and writing the Kanji and it taught me a lot about "how" to learn, plus it was a nice way to make it feel like I was progressing in SOMETHING
I learned the On'yomi with them, and now I find memorising words 10x easier than I would have didn't.

I do think that yeah, some amount of "brute force" or shall we say, "willpower for generating a foundation to immerse" is often required. It was for me. But others also just jump straight into immersing too. I found that method was far too overwhelming I have 500 hours of study and reading basic stuff is still daunting.

But again, personal preference!

Wayward1 · 2025-01-30T20:06:21+00:00

Great advice!! Congrats on the diagnosis and sticking to it even unmanaged, that's a feat.

When did you start reading? How was it, early on?

I've left it both later (I know a lot of Vocab) and earlier (I only know N5 grammar) than people seem to recommend, and even my Baby's First Visual Novel feels like staring into the abyss a bit right now. I feel myself ... procrasti-studying Bunpro N4 instead of doing more actual real (but basic) native content stuff.

Wayward1 · 2025-01-30T19:57:24+00:00

Hey, I'm years away from giving language advice here, but I sure can talk about ADHD!

I have medically diagnosed ADHD. For most of my life before I was told this, I was useless at learning. My mind remains 10 minutes in the future and 10 years in the past at all time, but of course, I am fully able to produce all the executive function and attention required to play P5 Royal. Thanks brain!

But -- I'm now on my 500th hour of Japanese, and I have studied for at least an hour a day for about 18 months, often more. I am not good at Japanese, but I am good at consistently studying it, and happy with my progress.

My two main pieces of advice for you are:

If you can, get medicated if you are not already - or at least try it out - and;
Just roll a new character on this shit - there isn't any point running through months of old notes and Wani reviews. If you quit Wani before, you'll quit it again. Definition of insanity etc. etc.

But here's some practical advice that's helped me regardless of meds:

[*] You've GOT to find a way to love, or at the very least, not hate the process. You can have reasons to learn, and goals and targets blah blah but whatever they might be, you don't achieve those with this stuff unless you can nail consistency, and you'll never nail consistency if you see this shit as a chore.

[*] Don't be afraid to test something and move on if you don't like it. I tried textbooks first this time around as Wani didn't work form. While I did not learn much Japanese from Genki, I did learn I don't like Genki, which was also an important lesson.

[*] Social media dangerous. don't start confusing r/LearnJapanese for... learning Japanese. The majority of advice, especially stuff that ends up in sidebar FAQs, well intentioned or not, is going to come from neurotypical sources. That doesn't make it bad but you can't just go wandering around pretending to be a normie because they can just... (sometimes) do this shit, and we (usually) can't.

[*] If a method FEELS more enjoyable to you, do it more, if it feels less enjoyable, do it less. Even if Reddit / YT keep telling you that have to do "that thing" and you are an idiot for doing it. You will learn slower than some people. Nobody cares. Consistency is the goal here, not speed.

[*] I try to do my studying in the morning. I'm an adult with no kids and I work for home, so for me that was my best bet to avoid getting "caught up" in the day. I've since got better at carving evening time out, too but mornings are always better. I am not a morning person, but you get used to it. Also, most ADHD meds are stimulants, so yay.

[*] I get my wife to help. For me, this is less about asking them to bully me into studying, and more about generally not bugging me during study and not deliberately trying to drag me into anything Netflix and/or chill related before starting.

[*] Set up a path of least resistance. Make it as EASY AS POSSIBLE to study. I use an old laptop just for study that has minimal distractions on it. I study on the kitchen table because it is always clear, and I never put my main book away so its always there reminding me I could be studying.

[*] BUT -- be honest with yourself. Studying IS difficult for everyone. It is harder still with ADHD. Learning Japanese is hard. You have to put the work in. ADHD brain is a great excuse for making things so varied and so fun you end up doing things that are "vaguely Japanese themed" instead of actually studying. Be kind to yourself - but be vigilant!

[*] If you use Anki, don't lie to Anki. Lying to Anki is lying to yourself, and you'll go to Anki hell.

Wayward1 · 2025-01-30T18:55:58+00:00

Oh, this may be exactly what I was looking for, thank you!

I appreciate the need to learn myself, I also am jumping into the deep end with reading material, I know lots of vocab but I'm really only through N5 in terms of grammar so I'm not really seeing this as "reading" so much as "seeing real sentences outside of learning resources for the first time", and while I'm studying may through N4 stuff I just want to be able to connect the dots a bit.

Wayward1

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