Tampus Cafe: A Fun Way to Focus
Under Development - a pomodoro timer wrapped in a turn-based coffee shop business strategy game.
End-to-end everything
Personal Project
Tampus Café —a play on tempus (time in latin) & an espresso tamper— is essentially a pomodoro timer wrapped in a turn-based coffee shop business strategy game. I’m a big fan of the pomodoro technique, but it sometimes fee to use it: so I asked myself: how might I reinforce that habit by employing my enthusiasm for cozy games and bring some silly joy into my workday?
The Insight
As a dorky internet child, I have never stopped thinking about the game Lemonade Stand (and later, Dope Wars). I’ve tried to rebuild it numerous times as a side project (with hand-coded JS,) but each time realized that as much as I have a degree in business modelling & calculus, this was not really how I wanted to spend my weekends.
Enter 2024 and the birth of '“vibe coding” (which maybe should be called Casino Coding). I immediately tried to get the job done to limited success (the state of LLM hallucinations was a bit too extreme at the time). Over the past 2 years, as we’ve tried and tested a variety of philosophies at work (memory banks, context engineering, multi-agent-workflow orchestration, etc etc), we started seeing some potential in the idea of “recursive learning.” Then one day on github, I noticed a trusted dev friend follow a repo called /compound-engineering: essentially a Claude Code plugin that has codified, refined, and provided a comprehensive, well-reputed, and orchestrated set of workflows and agents that combined the best of what we’ve learned. As someone who is happy to not-reinvent-the-wheel (but cannot use this on client work before a major security review, unfortunately) I figured this project might just be complex, but comprehensible enough to test on. It was an EXCELLENT idea.
I’ve been using it personally to great success, and while the majority of my work projects using similar technologies are under strict NDA, I hope this indicates my level of capability. All of this, including the graphics, code, gameplay engine, additional SME agent/skill development and accessory features like a dev panel and furniture placement UI were spec’d and generated in approximately 30 hours of active work.
Current Status
This project is currently under development with plenty of features to come, including audio integration (SFX, focus music, and alert sounds), website/app blocking during focus, notifications, and additional game features like a furniture shop mini-game, staffing, and recipe builder.
