mazegame/projects/kissaten_yugure/docs/DESIGN.md

Kissaten Yūgure — Design document

Working title: Kissaten Yūgure ("Twilight Coffee Shop") Platform: MSX2 · Library: MSXgl (C) · ROM: ASCII16 MegaROM

Amendments. This document still describes the game's intent and is the place to start. A few specifics have since been decided differently — where they conflict, the documents below win:

• Cast size: four, not six to eight (§3). The four examples in §3 became the entire roster. Rationale in PLAN.md §6; full arcs in SCRIPT.md.
• Endings: one, not several (§8 stage 5). PLAN.md §6.
• Saving: a real save disk (.dsk), not yet working — see the disk section in ../CLAUDE.md. Note the RP-5C01 CMOS holds only 6 bytes through MSXgl, so it is not an alternative for a ~40-byte SaveState.
• Music (§7) is out of date. It describes a PSG / MML → NDP pipeline; the working pipeline is msx-music-generator → lVGM + ayFX. Which chip this game targets is still open — PLAN.md §8 item 15.
• The brew minigame is coffee-only. Aki's cream soda is poured, not brewed, so her visits skip it — SCRIPT.md §8.

Build order and per-stage requirements live in PLAN.md, which supersedes the scope ladder in §8 below with a finer eleven-milestone breakdown.

1. Concept

You inherit a small kissaten (coffee shop) in a fictional provincial Japanese town in 1987. A cozy, no-fail-state game about serving regulars, learning their stories, and watching the town and seasons change.

Audience: adult retro gamers with a love of Japanese art, computers, and late-80s Japan nostalgia. The MSX2 itself is part of the fantasy — the game should look like it came off an MSX magazine cover.

Tone references: A Short Hike (pace and warmth), Konami/Compile-era MSX2 pixel art, Showa-era kissaten culture, gentle city-pop-adjacent PSG music.

The cozy contract: no fail states. You cannot go bankrupt. Money gates cosmetic and menu upgrades (better grinder, jazz records, a cat), not survival. Progression = unlocking regulars' stories and seasonal change.

2. Core loop

One in-game day ≈ 5–10 real minutes, in three phases:

1. Morning (prep): choose today's menu focus (coffee blend, toast set, curry), check the radio for weather (weather affects who visits), buy stock.
2. Open hours (the heart): customers arrive one or two at a time. Take orders, brew/cook via a timing minigame, and — most importantly — talk. Regulars have multi-day story arcs told in short dialogue beats.
3. Evening (close): count the till, journal entry summarizing the day, save.

Brew minigame: a siphon coffee brew with a "release at the right moment" mechanic. One-button friendly, thematic, satisfying to master. Quality result feeds into customer affinity slightly (never punishingly).

3. The regulars

Six to eight recurring characters; this is where the game lives. Examples:

• The retired stationmaster
• A high-schooler studying for entrance exams
• A manga artist missing deadlines
• A widow who orders the same thing daily

Each has a story arc of ~12–20 short scenes, triggered by day count, season, weather, or what you serve them. Serving the right thing at the right moment advances arcs — the player learns preferences by paying attention, which mechanically rewards the "regulars at my shop" fantasy.

Visitor logic per open-hours tick: roll against a weighted table filtered by (season, weather, time-of-day, days-since-last-visit). Simple, tunable in a spreadsheet, and it naturally produces patterns players notice and love ("the stationmaster always comes when it rains").

4. Screen layout — SCREEN 5 (256×212)

Region	Height	Contents
Status bar	16 px	Day + season · clock · money (¥)
Shop scene	132 px	Tile/bitmap background: window, shelves, radio. Door zone (customer entry), counter zone (16×16 layered customer sprites), siphon rig zone (brew minigame).
Dialogue window	64 px	48×48 portrait left; 3 lines × 26 chars text with typewriter reveal; choice cursor on line 3 when needed.

Deliberately static-heavy: only sprites move, so the MSX2's weak scrolling is sidestepped entirely. Status bar and dialogue window redraw rarely — only the scene needs per-frame attention. This is the single biggest scope-saver.

5. Hardware / MSXgl mapping

Video. SCREEN 5 (G4), 16 colors from 512.

• VRAM page 0: visible shop background bitmap.
• VRAM page 1: asset warehouse — customer sprite frames, portraits, UI tiles, blitted with VDP commands (HMMM); dialogue box open/close is HMMV rectangle fill + font rendering, never touching the scene.

Seasonal palette trick. Author the background once, designed around palette slots: sky-through-window colors in slots 8–11, wood/warm tones in 4–7. Each season and time of day is then just a 32-byte palette table — morning spring light vs. rainy autumn dusk on the same bitmap, basically free. Optionally lerp between palettes across the in-game day for a slow ambient shift. This is the most atmospheric feature in the game.

Sprites. Sprite mode 2 (per-line colors on 16×16). Two layered sprites per customer (outline + fill) for the classic MSX2 look. Max two customers on screen plus player hands/steam effects — nowhere near the 8-per-line limit.

Portraits. 48×48 with three expressions per character (neutral, happy, troubled), copied from page 1 into the dialogue box. Portraits are where the pixel-art budget goes; they sell the characters.

ROM. ASCII16 MegaROM from day one — dialogue, portraits, and music banks will not fit in 32KB. MSXgl supports banked ROMs well.

6. Data model

typedef struct {
    u8  id;
    u8  arc_stage;        // progress through their story
    u8  affinity;         // 0-255, raised by right orders
    u8  last_visit_day;
} Regular;

typedef struct {
    u16 day;
    u8  season;           // derives palette set
    u8  weather;          // affects visitor table
    u16 money;
    u8  unlocked_items;   // bitmask: grinder, records, cat...
    Regular regulars[8];
} SaveState;              // ~40 bytes → trivial to save

Dialogue is the biggest data mass. Scenes stored in a flat script format:

(trigger conditions) → (portrait id, expression, text lines,
                        optional choice, effects)

Authored in YAML/JSON; a small Node.js compiler (tools/compile_dialogue.js) emits C arrays or a binary blob for a MegaROM bank. Budget: ~8 characters × ~15 scenes plus ambient lines.

7. Music

PSG via the MML → NDP compiler → ndp_player pipeline, with AI-assisted MML generation through tools/generate_mml.js (Anthropic API).

Needs: 6–8 short cozy loops rather than driving action tracks — morning, afternoon, evening, rain, plus one theme per major story beat.

Diegetic jukebox: the record-player upgrade lets the player choose the shop's background track — a feature and a home for all generated music in one.

8. Scope ladder

Build in this order so every stage is a playable game:

1. Shop scene + one customer + brew minigame + serve loop, no story
2. Day/night + save + money
3. Dialogue engine + two regulars with short arcs ← the real milestone
4. Seasons/weather/palettes
5. Remaining cast, upgrades, endings

If serving the exam student his usual and getting one new line of his story feels good at stage 3, the game works.

9. Other principles

• Lean hard into palette work — the MSX2's superpower.
• Keep text minimal or bilingual-friendly; the Japanese retro community is a big chunk of the real audience.
• Let the soundtrack carry the mood — cozy games live or die on music.
• Marketing hook: "run a coffee shop on real MSX2 hardware."