We’ve decided to post weekly updates, so you can follow our progress more closely. All newsletter subscribers will still get the bi-weekly emails, which cover a broader timeline, so don’t worry. 😃 Anyway, without further ado, let’s get into it.
New Implementations 🎁
User Interface
1. We added a new welcome screen for players in the Menu section, and it’s sure to give everyone a warm, fuzzy feeling. 😉
2. Nothing beats tooltips for presenting information you need without even having to click anything. We implemented a bunch of them:
a. City tooltips:
Summary View
Marketing View
b. Locality tooltips:
Summary view
Marketing view
Buy stand view
Compare stand view
Breaking News section
c. Dashboard and Key Financial Statements tooltips:
Income & Expense view
Income & Expense detailed reports view
Financial reports graph view
Statements view
Stand dashboard view
Banking view
Environment
1. Added the count indicator to show the number of burgers and drinks left in each stand. This way, you'll always see how quickly your stock is running out.
General fixes 🛠️
Stopped the perfect recipe animation from blocking the UI during the day
Stopped the perfect recipe feedback repeatedly appearing for a single customer group
Prevented the quality indicators from showing during the night
Corrected the merging highlights in the Breaking News section
Modified loan accessibility to include a check for debt-to-equity ratio
Changed the fast-forward sound effect to start and stop after each button click
Latest Build: 0.59ks 🥳
Short Weekly Update #1 📰
Hey there heroes, 🤗
We’ve decided to post weekly updates, so you can follow our progress more closely. All newsletter subscribers will still get the bi-weekly emails, which cover a broader timeline, so don’t worry. 😃 Anyway, without further ado, let’s get into it.
New Implementations 🎁
User Interface
1. We added a new welcome screen for players in the Menu section, and it’s sure to give everyone a warm, fuzzy feeling. 😉
2. Nothing beats tooltips for presenting information you need without even having to click anything. We implemented a bunch of them:
a. City tooltips:
Summary View
Marketing View
b. Locality tooltips:
Summary view
Marketing view
Buy stand view
Compare stand view
Breaking News section
c. Dashboard and Key Financial Statements tooltips:
Income & Expense view
Income & Expense detailed reports view
Financial reports graph view
Statements view
Stand dashboard view
Banking view
Environment
1. Added the count indicator to show the number of burgers and drinks left in each stand. This way, you'll always see how quickly your stock is running out.
General fixes 🛠️
Stopped the perfect recipe animation from blocking the UI during the day
Stopped the perfect recipe feedback repeatedly appearing for a single customer group
Prevented the quality indicators from showing during the night
Corrected the merging highlights in the Breaking News section
Modified loan accessibility to include a check for debt-to-equity ratio
Changed the fast-forward sound effect to start and stop after each button click
Latest Build: 0.59ks 🥳
Progress Update: Crafting Tasty Burger Recipes
Hello Business Hero,
So glad you stopped by today. Let's dive right in.
The recipe section is where you craft your magic burger formula for various tastes and wallets in the city. It works like a kitchen without the heat of cooking, It's up to you to decide the burger recipe and pricing for your food stand.
What goes in your burger?🍔
The recipe section has five ingredients with a minimum and maximum amount you can include in your burger:
Patty: 100g - 300g per burger.
Tomato slices: 0 - 5 slices per burger.
Lettuce leaves: 0 - 5 leaves per burger.
Cheese slices: 0 - 5 slices per burger.
Sauce: 0 - 3 sachets per burger.
The unit cost of your burger will depend on the amount of ingredients you include in it.
Your ultimate goal is to discover the perfect combination of ingredients and price for every customer group in the city. This isn't as straightforward as you might think. The city's population has nine customer groups.
Each group is particular about how your business can provide services that match their lifestyle. For example, Students mainly prefer a cheap burger than one that is healthy or nutritious and expensive. Fit Ones on the other hand, care more about the burger's quality than it being relatively low cost.
After customers buy your burger, they give you feedback immediately about different aspects of your business.
If your recipe and price perfectly match their taste and wallet, you get a perfect recipe feedback.
A perfect what? 🤣
Yep, a Perfect Recipe Feedback. You can track your recipe feedback from all the customer segments in the Perfect Recipe section. Like all new product development efforts, you start with a blank slate, not knowing the exact combination of ingredients your target customer would love.
Of course, all the customer segments will have their unique feedback on each recipe you put out because, as the popular saying goes, One customer's food is another's poison. This is where product-market fit is key.
You can quickly see what each customer segment thinks of your burger recipe in the Perfect Recipe section.
When you discover the perfect recipe for a customer group, the ingredient combination will be unlocked for that group.
A perfect burger for one segment could be a terrible burger or a burger with too much or too few ingredients for another segment. And so it goes until you conquer the city.
It's vital for customers to love your burgers because when they do, the feedback they give improves your business's reputation and helps you attract even more customers.
And that's it for this update. To get these updates delivered to you first, directly to your inbox, please join our community. We've got other exclusive perks waiting for you.
Live Long and Prosper 👋, Team Visionaries
PS: I think I need to go grab a burger. All this talk about burger recipes has got me salivating. 😋
If you enjoyed reading this update, please hit the like 👍 button below to let us know. Your up-votes motivate us to keep going strong. 💪 Thanks! ❤
Progress Update: Inventory Management and Automation
Hello Business Heroes,
Welcome to our latest progress update. While we’ve been spending a tremendous amount of time just debugging the financials section😭, we still managed to get work done on the Inventory section for Burgers. Have a look.
Burger Inventory 🍔
The Burger Inventory section is where you manage all the stock you need for your burgers - Buns, Patties, Tomatoes, Lettuce, Cheese, and Sauces.
A quick run down of the various sections:
Stock (Total) - Helps you track how much of each ingredient you have left in stock and your new total (in brackets) after you make an order.
Next Day’s Purchase Order - Where you order how much of each ingredient you need for the next business day.
Burger Counter - Shows the number of burgers you can make with your current ingredient inventory size.
Side Note: Whenever an ingredient is not enough for the number of buns you are ordering, the stock total stays red. It turns green when it’s enough.
Daily Cost and Excess Loss - Daily cost is the amount your next day’s order costs. Excess loss is the cost of all wasted ingredients. Ingredients get wasted when you order after your storage is full.
Storage Capacity - The brown bar represents how much storage your total stock has used up and how much is left.
Auto-stock 🤖
Inventory management is one of the activities you will be carrying out daily to ensure you have enough stock for the next day. You will frequently have to increase or decrease your stock to avoid buying more or less than what you need. For Burger Inventory, this means managing quantities for all your ingredients individually.
As you expand, it’s only normal that you will want to automate your inventory process. We implemented a pay-per-use solution called Auto-stock to provide this automation.
With one click, auto-stock helps you calculate the quantity of ingredients you require for the number of buns you have in stock. This way, you can quickly balance your order quantity across multiple stands, save time, and avoid overspending on inventory.
You will pay a fee every time you use the auto-stock function, so keep an eye on your account balance when you use it. If you are running low on cash, you can always manage your stock manually. 😊
After implementing this function, we were impressed with its impact on the gameplay experience. We are sure you’d appreciate the convenience it introduces to your business management activities when you can afford to use it.
That's it for this update, folks! To get these updates delivered to you first, directly to your inbox, please join our community. We've got other exclusive perks waiting for you.
Live Long and Prosper 👋, Team Visionaries
If you enjoyed reading this update, please hit the like 👍 button below to let us know. Your up-votes motivate us to keep going strong. 💪 Thanks! ❤
Progress Update: Financial Reports in Single and Multiplayer
Hello Business Heroes,
Welcome to our very first dev update of the year. We are glad to be back at it and excited to show you what we've been doing.
Financial Reports📃
The financials section serves as your automated accounting system. It comes fitted with the main financial components of a real-world business to help you stay on top of your business. 🧐
The design for the date navigation system is still in progress, so keep your eyes on every other thing and pretend the odd looking, dark blue buttons don't exist for now. 😁
Single-player🎲
Tracking income, expenses, profit, and other line items over specified periods in single player is a breeze with the system.
Multiplayer🎲🎲
After successfully deploying it for single-player in December, we resumed the year by integrating the financial system into multiplayer and fixing all the inevitable accounting bugs.
During the integration, amongst other things, we ensured that:
All the correct financial models are updated during the business day so that accounting always tallies whenever you check it.
All data values relating to your business's financial history (Today, Year-to-date, Lifetime, etc.) get updated with each sale.
The Day, Month, and Year financial views are also updated with each sale.
Performance Testing 🥊🌟
With that done, we proceeded to test data performance across many days to ensure optimum speed for generating financial reports under different conditions.
1,000 days: 6 stands test.
Result: The speed is great. 😎 There are no noticeable delays in report generation after interaction with the date navigation system.
10,000 days: 10 stands test. We wanted to push the system to the limits and see if everything still works with days of more than 27 years and a data history of 10 stands.
Result: Speed could be a little better. 🤔The interaction with the date navigation system felt a little bit slower but generally, it's not bad for data of such size (80 Mb).
That's it for this update, folks! The entire team and I wish you an extremely productive 2022. We certainly look forward to a fantastic time together this year.
Live Long and Prosper 👋, Team Visionaries
If you enjoyed reading this update, please hit the like 👍 button below to let us know. Your up-votes motivate us to keep going strong. 💪 Thanks! ❤
Progress Update: Add-ons Management, Gameplay Trailer, and more.
If you enjoyed reading this update, please hit the like 👍 button below to let us know. Your up-votes motivate us to keep going strong. 💪 Thanks! ❤
Hi Business Heroes,
It's been a minute! So much has happened over the last few weeks and we can't wait to share it all with you. First off, have you seen the new trailer?
Gameplay Trailer
If you haven't seen it yet, what are you waiting for? Have a look. The video showcases some gameplay mechanics like burger recipe creation, inventory and employee management, and equipment upgrades:
[previewyoutube="rJCIgvsvbv4;full"]
Now, for some development updates. 👯♂️
Add-ons Management
Add-ons are equipment upgrades or enhancements that improve your service offering to customers when added to your burger stand. There are 21 available, ranging from Bluetooth speakers and freezers to stronger grills, super blowing fans, and even a nitro vehicle booster.
Not all add-ons are compatible with every stand though, and you can tell them apart by the blue padlock on some of them.
(click for higher resolution)
Want to make those impatient customers wait in line longer? Get a LED TV screen 📺 to entertain them. Need to cater to more diet-conscious customers? Get organic veggies and start using organic tomatoes 🍅, lettuce, and cheese 🧀 in your burgers.
Add-ons are a great way to deal with bad weather conditions and improve your customer satisfaction. Both of which ultimately improve your business profits. Knowing when to invest in purchasing them would play a big role in your success as a food truck entrepreneur.
Multiple Save/Load File System 💾
We worked on a multiple save/load files system and integrated it into the game’s User Interface. Multiple save/load file systems are a MUST today, and a game without it shouldn’t be released. 👀
How it works is, new games in Career mode are automatically saved after each business day. Currently, saved games display your company name, the number of stands you have, your cash balance at the time of your last save, and the date and time of the save.
Is there anything else you’d like to see shown? You can let us know in the comments.
Bug Alert 🐛
We also caught a bug that gets customers stuck in front of a stand and simultaneously removes the employee responsible for that stand. It’s a chase condition error that removes a dealing employee when trying to serve customers.
The bug probably likes seeing customers get frustrated 🤣. Fixing it has been a little bit tricky, but we’d get that bug annihilated soon enough. We certainly can’t have frustrated customers walking around the city.
New Team Member 🎉✨
Finally, we got to welcome a new member to the team! His name is Motawea and he is a talented developer based in Egypt. We are excited to have him join us as we bring Business Heroes to life. Please extend a warm welcome to him in the comments. 😉
That's it for this update Heroes, catch you in two weeks...
Live Long and Prosper 👋, Team Visionaries
If you enjoyed reading this update, please hit the like 👍 button below to let us know. Your up-votes motivate us to keep going strong. 💪 Thanks! ❤
Exclusive Interview with Indie Pod: An Indie Games Podcast
If you enjoyed reading this update, please hit the like 👍 button below to let us know. Your up-votes motivate us to keep going strong. 💪 Thanks! ❤
Hi Business Heroes,
Great to catch up with you all again. This week, we sat down with the host of Indie Pod: An Indie Games Podcast to talk about our journey developing Business Heroes: Food Truck Simulation and the lessons we’ve learned.
Indie pod is a weekly podcast about Indie Games and their creators.
In this episode, we discussed the evolution of management simulation games over the years and the experience we wanted you to have while playing Business Heroes.
You also get to hear more about how gaming influenced our journey (including how someone crashed their dad's car after playing Need for Speed: Underground 😂) and how our Studio, Visionaries, operates.
Finally, we talk about our plans for the future and how we intend to contribute to gaming by providing rich entertainment embedded with several real-world entrepreneurial practices.
After listening, the whole team would love to hear your thoughts, so please drop your comments in the discussions. We’d be looking out for it. 😉
P.S: Did you know we have a bi-weekly progress report we send out to special members of our community? In it we present a slightly closer look at our activities every 2 weeks. You can start receiving your bi-weekly progress report by clicking here.
Live Long and Prosper 👋, Team Visionaries
If you enjoyed reading this update, please hit the like 👍 button below to let us know. Your up-votes motivate us to keep going strong. 💪 Thanks! ❤
