Play as a cute robotic drone in the vaguely utopian future, working at a café by the train station.

🔞  18+ only, thanks!  🔞

I had originally decided to not enter Strawb Jam 9 due to burnout. But then I accidentally hacked something together I guess

[ About ]

Somehow, humanity made it through the 21st century.

Actually, let's not sell ourselves short. Things are pretty alright. The environment has started to recover, wealth inequality is lower than it's been for centuries, and true democracy is being built as we speak. Somehow, unexpectedly, everything turned out fine. The process did involve a bit of a robot apocalypse, but that's all settled now. You are one of these robots, and you're here to do your part in keeping the new soft-utopian society ticking along nicely.

DRONE CAFÉ is a point-and-click action thingy. You will be serving customers and getting to know some of your fellow drones, and altering yourself to become better at those things. It shares a setting with some of my other work, but the quick summary is: Soft-utopian near-future setting where there's lots of cool posthuman machines to kiss. It's not fully automated gay luxury space communism just yet, but we have achieved bisexual low-Earth-orbit social democracy.

Temper your expectations, though, it's just a small and byte-syzed "score attack" type game with a few little story vignettes. It's a complete experience, but I've tagged it as a "prototype" because it's small and experimental (and preeeeetty janky). Going forward I can always add more vignettes or do balance patches. We'll see!

[ Content Notes ]

This game contains gently pulsating lights, and plenty of them. Transitions between them are generally fairly gentle, but there might be some flashing every now and then.

Mind control kink is all over this game. It's all wholesome teasing, and there's no attempt to actually hypnotise the player for real. (It will not attempt to put you into a trance.) But if you're uncomfortable with those themes, or the idea of being reprogrammed, this might not be the title for you. No sex scenes or even much in the way of implication, but teasing does happen.

By default, the game will play some mouth sounds (chewing, drinking, etc.) If you find these unpleasant, be aware that there's a setting in the options menu to replace those sounds. If you enable it, a more generic NES-style 8-bit SFX will play instead - this shouldn't trigger misophonia.

The game attempts to calculate a default drone ID, consistent across installations but different-ish for different users. To ruin the magic a little: It attempts device fingerprinting, throws the results into a one-way cryptographic hash function, and picks two bytes from the hash. This all happens strictly on-device/in-browser, and it doesn't look at any actual files. No data is ever transmitted, stored, or displayed.

Since this is Itch, home of indie horror, I'd like to clarify that this is a non-subverted game. There's no twist, it's just meant to be low-key nice. What you see is what you get.

[ Known issues ]

• An off-by-one error causes the guests to not order tea except under rare circumstances. This is not intentional, I'll fix it as soon as the Strawberry Jam rating period is over.
• The shaders don't work in all browsers, so the spiral might not display. This seems to happen in some builds of Firefox, but not all. (I have gotten reports for 135.0.1 but cannot reproduce these.) If you are affected, I recommend switching to a native build, or - failing that - trying in a Chromium-based browser.
• If your timing is exactly right, it's possible to carry an item into the post-shift scene. This is a frame-perfect trick, I think, so I'm seriously impressed someone managed to get it.

[ Controls ]

The entire game is controlled with the mouse (though there are some keyboard shortcuts.) It should also work on touchscreeens, but it's not designed for that.

Make sure you at least skim the in-game help section. If you play the story mode, additional mechanics are introduced one at a time.

If you find this all a bit confusing, you can watch some gameplay footage here - perhaps it'll help.