← The catalogue · No. 04
The game
Pet Cafe is a cozy tycoon with a real simulation underneath. You manage a coffeehouse staffed and patronized by pets: cats, dogs, birds, and lizards, each with genetic traits, personalities, and quirks. You name your cafe, pick four starting pets, and the rest of the world builds out around the choices you make week by week.
What you do
The main loop is breeding. Traits, colors, and rarity are inheritable and generations carry through, so your tenth-generation cat is genuinely descended from your first. Around that loop there's a menu to design (the generated items follow the season, the current trend, and which pets are running the place), staff to hire, salaries to pay, and shows to enter (where personality matters as much as breeding does).
Every so often the mayor or another NPC writes you a letter, threading a small narrative through the simulation. Some of those NPC visits become recurring storylines.
The simulation
Customer regulars each have multi-beat storylines and build affinity for your cafe. NPCs visit on scripted cadences. Trends drift through the city, and your cafe scores against them. Pets age, retire, and have wishes. The economy has menu pricing, wages, upgrades, and a final-score number that takes everything into account.