
Run a sweet tea stand in this 2D pixel-art business simulator inspired by tycoon classics. Manage inventory, adjust your recipe, hire staff, invest in upgrades, and pick locations to maximize profits. Build a lasting business in endless Career mode, or chase high scores in a 30-day Challenge mode.
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About
Welcome to the ultimate beverage business simulation. Sweet Tea Tycoon is a pure, classic management game where your strategic choices determine your success. Step into the shoes of an entrepreneur and manage every detail of your daily operations, from the weather-dependent recipe to the location you set up in.
Every successful business starts with a plan. Before you open your stand for the day, you must analyze the local news and weather forecast to make crucial decisions:
Manage Inventory: Balance your budget across five core supplies: tea bags, sugar, lemons, ice, and cups.
Perfect the Recipe: Adjust your sweetness, lemon ratio, and ice levels based on the day's temperature and customer reactions to maximize satisfaction.
Strategic Locations: Pick the best location to set up shop based on daily news events to capture the biggest crowds.
Set Your Price: Find the sweet spot between a premium product and an affordable thirst-quencher.
As the profits roll in, reinvest your hard-earned cash to transform your humble stand into a highly efficient operation.
Dynamic Visual Upgrades: Purchase upgrades that increase brewing speed, allow for bulk supply purchases, or let you make your own ice. Many of these upgrades physically appear on your stand, changing its look as you grow!
Hire Staff: Bring on a Brewer, Cashier, or Greeter to improve brewing times, increase serving speeds, and keep impatient customers happy. Watch your team appear on-screen to help manage the rush.
Expand Capacity: Invest in upgrades that increase your storage, boost customer patience, and drive up the premium they are willing to pay.
Whether you want a relaxing management experience or a tight, strategic race against the clock, there is a mode for you. During the day, you can watch your business run at slow or fast speeds, or skip straight to the end of the day to review your results and profit/loss chart.
Career Mode: Build a lasting legacy in an endless, open-ended business simulation.
Challenge Mode: Test your entrepreneurial skills and see how much profit you can generate in a strict 30 in-game day time limit.

Sweet Tea Tycoon is the debut title from Scarlet Carnation Games. Built from the ground up in GameMaker, the project features original pixel art character sprites, custom background music composed in LMMS, and a handcrafted interface designed entirely by a solo developer.
While the core game is a solo endeavor, bringing this simulation to life was supported by the talent and feedback of a wider community:
Audio & Typography: Featuring the "Pixel Code Medium" font by Qwerasd, alongside immersive audio sourced from creators (el_boss, Zott820, Sanedish, IENBA, and Ryding).
Playtesting: A massive thank you to the dedicated playtesters who helped balance the economy, test the mechanics, and find bugs: Alana Antón, BeaZe, Necriptos, ReasonerUK, Foquinha_Mag, MoldyTofu, James Rubery, Spudicus, and GiggaMouse.
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All-time low is the lowest price we've recorded for this game since we started tracking it.
Languages: English
Reviews
Cute little game, well worth the price and kept me happily occupied for a couple hours! My one critique is that you eventually can't serve all the customers because the cup storage is not large enough. I had consistently more than 450 customers and would be running out of cups before noon! WHAT WILL THEY DO WITHOUT THEIR SWEET TEA?!
It's a good start to reliving the old simple days of Lemonade Tycoon but there are some parts that definitely need reworking. 1) Advertising and staff are completely unnecessary. I did not use either of those and still got a healthy business in the most expensive area. 2) The purchasing limits are very fiddly and if you are not careful you can lose money. Hypothetically if I have 99/100 units, I can still buy a full priced stack of raw materials that will give me 25 units but I only get 1. The constant looking at the numbers was not a fun part of the experience 3) At their highest, the storage numbers are still quite low 4) You can only operate one stand at a time. I would be keen to see operating multiple stands, needing to hire staff and weather affecting demand differently for the various locations. 5) For the life of me I can't detect a true repeatable pattern to temperature/weather conditions and demand, it makes no sense 6) The number of upgrades is very low, they can be achieved relatively early and quickly which leaves nothing to aspire to 7) The profit graph is annoying. It shows you constantly up and down as you buy raw material and incur high costs for the day. I prefer a display that gives me an income statement with revenue, cost of goods sold, operating expenses (rent, staff, advertising) + a separate balance sheet since you don't use all of the raw material you buy on the same day. This will show a much cleaner and more useful indication of where you stand as a business. The game is nice for the nostalgia hit and while I understand it is quite cheap, there are still some easy QoL things that could be added to make it better all round. I give this a barely passing 5/10.
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Very reminiscent of the browser based tycoon games of the early 2000s. Give it a shot.
Simple but very effective and addicting tycoon game
A cute little game that scratched an itch for me. I played for two hours and beat it. It was worth the three bucks, but I wouldn't pay any more than that. I wish it was more challenging.
A very fun time killer at a very reasonable price for what you get c:. Reminds me heavily of old newground era tycoon games, with just the right amount of modern charm & performance to make it easy to sink a couple of hours into.
Quite a good little tycoon game, but needs a little tweaking to make it perfect. It's quite easy. The recipe doesn't need to vary at all between locations, it seems to matter more to follow news trends for bitterness/ice etc. You also don't get feedback from customers on _why_ they didn't like it. It seems that foot traffic varies wildly from day to day - one day it'll be packed and the next an occasional visitor, without really understanding why. The game is also quite short - once you've purchased all the upgrades you basically just restock and then run the day at 25x and you make a killing. I always found I was running out of cups/ice before customers which was a bit annoying - there should be higher tiers so you can not run out. Perhaps some tuning could extend gameplay beyond an hour or two, to make the upgrade/progression curve a bit flatter. Also reputation was a bit buggy - the bar on the left was empty during planning and full during the day, it should persist.
Paid to play bc it seemed very interesting - I beat the whole game within 3 hours (with me stepping away and playing other games) so im not sure its really worth 4 bucks but if more places were added or DLC was added I would be interested in playing. Overall - i do recommend this to others who like easier tycoon games that dont take forever to max everything. It ran smoothly though and was easy enough to catch on. Tutorial was very easy to follow as well. ETA: Just read an update for some future updates to the game and I definitely think the future updates will improve the overall experience as well!
It is a beautifully simple management game that completely hooks you right from the start, making it way too easy to lose track of time while building your empire.
close to the oiriginal, finished to early
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