Post-Jam Devlog #1 – Under the Counter at The Sleepy Leaf

Post-Jam Devlog #1 – Under the Counter at The Sleepy Leaf

Jam voting is almost over, so this felt like a good moment to pop our heads up from behind the tea bar and talk about how this thing actually came together.

The build on this page is the exact jam submission. No secret post-jam patch, no “director’s cut” branch. Just three very intense weeks of a small team throwing art, code, music, SFX, and ideas at each other until it clicked into a cozy café.

The Loop Beneath the Calm

On the surface, The Sleepy Leaf is simple: open the shop, serve tea, help a parade of forest animals wind down for hibernation.

Underneath, there’s a surprisingly strict little machine:

A day/night loop that decides when the shop opens, when the line ramps up, and when everyone gets gently shown the door.

A customer system that handles who arrives, where they stand, what they order, and how they react to whatever you serve.

A drink model that tracks what’s in every cup: water temp, tea type, steeping, powders, milk, ice, toppings.

A recipe brain that compares the “truth” in the cup with the recipe card and turns that into feedback, coins, and tips.

All of that powers a cast of regulars: a frog, a turtle, a bear, a badger, a bumble bee queen, and a squirrel, each with their own little personality and order patterns.

The cozy vibe sits on top of something closer to a tiny point-of-sale system for woodland tea.

Making the Bar Feel Good

Across the three weeks, a big chunk of time went into making the counter feel nice to actually use.

We built a custom drag-and-drop layer so mugs, teabags, spoons, and toppings glide rather than fight you. Snap spots on the bar know where things should land—under the water dispenser, in front of the customer, on the topping plate—so you get a little bit of “barista autopilot” without losing control.

Ice got its own little ecosystem: a scooper, cubes spawning into the cup, and cleanup when they spill. Water dispensers probe for mugs, turn visible streams on and off, and update the drink underneath. Teabag zones count dips so “perfectly steeped” isn’t just flavor text. Toppings all plug into the same logic so the recipe system actually understands that you added mint or lemon, not just pixels on top.

All of that had to stay flexible so new ingredients and props can be added later without redoing the whole bar.

Playtesting Like a Real Café

One of the biggest focuses for this jam was playtesting.

We pushed fresh builds often—sometimes multiple times a day—and had the whole team hop in to play, break things, and report back. Art, code, music, SFX, and writing all used the same builds, so feedback flowed fast: readability issues, confusion points, pacing tweaks, bugs, and little UX papercuts all surfaced early.

A lot of the small details (how forgiving recipes are, how fast the line moves, how the camera behaves, how long days feel) came directly out of this loop. The goal was always the same: make it feel player-first and more polished than you’d expect from a jam game.

Art, Sound, and Vibes

While the systems were getting wired, the art and audio side was building the mood.

Backgrounds, props, shelves, fireplace, jars, and all the little details that make the shop feel like a real place came in steadily over the jam, and the game had to adjust to them just as quickly. UI and icon work aimed for “readable at a glance” so you can tell hot vs iced, tea types, and recipe requirements even when a line of animals is staring you down.

On the audio side, the team went a bit extra: we built our own Animal Crossing–style gibberish system. The SFX / foley artist recorded a whole set of phonetic sounds by hand, and the programmers wired them into the dialogue system so each character “speaks” in their own pattern of little syllables while text scrolls. On top of that, calm looping music, clinks, scoops, pours, doors, and UI sounds all route through a shared mixer so Web builds, tablets, and desktop feel consistent. The little radio on the counter is wired into the same system, just for fun.

A Tight-Knit Jam Team

Nothing here was built in isolation. Programmers, artists, composer, SFX/foley, and writers were all iterating on top of each other’s work in real time:

- New art dropped in and the systems had to support it without breaking existing interactions.

- New music and SFX came online and had to route cleanly through the same audio spine.

- New recipes, dialogue, and customer ideas popped up and slotted into the existing loop.

- Playtests from the whole team pushed constant small adjustments to pacing, feedback, and clarity.

Most days looked like: somebody ships assets or ideas, somebody else adjusts the systems, playtest, repeat. That tight feedback loop is the real reason The Sleepy Leaf feels cohesive for a jam game.