1. Menu screen now unlocks features based on player progression level 🎚️ 2. Configured keyboard ⌨️ hotkeys for different game functions.
General fixes and modifications 🛠️
1. Updated the stand management Icons to the latest versions. 2. The missions progress bar is no longer visible in multiplayer mode or when there are no missions. 3. Fixed the bug that made client loans 💰 in multiplayer reflect on the host’s account. 4. City matrix now activates on hover 🖱️
Weekly Short Update #24 📰
Hello heroes, 🤗
New Implementations 🎁
User Interface
1. Implemented updates for Stand spot 📍button when state changes due to purchase/upgrade/sale in multiplayer mode.
Environment
1. Added a probability factor to the display of the following animations:
Unhappy customer ☹️
Happy customer 🕺
Scotch 🐶 appearing on Menu Screen
General fixes and modifications 🛠️
1. Fixed the error affecting the Stand movement 🚘 function in single and multiplayer. 2. Stopped employee icon 🖼️ button from flickering when switching stands. 3. Fixed duration of mission 2 to accommodate 6 days 📅 playthrough. 4. Events 📰 now trigger successfully in missions 2 & 3. 5. Fixed an error affecting the player’s second stand when advancing from mission 1 to mission 2. 6. Sound effects are no longer audible when the volume is set to zero. 🔇
Brand Your Way To The Top! 🔝
Hello heroes! 👋
In this episode, we'd be going behind the scenes to explore exactly how marketing works in the game. So come along. 😉
The Role of Marketing
Marketing helps increase awareness for your food stand in a locality or city. Because your food stand will have competition, marketing is the only way to protect and grow 📈 your brand while diminishing 📉 that of the competition.
Design
There are five types of marketing available: Pamphlet 📜 and Social Media 📱 marketing affect a Stand's brand strength in a locality, while Online 🌐, Radio 📻, and TV 📺 marketing affect the company's brand strength across the city 🏙️.
Each marketing type has a minimum, average, and maximum investment size, cost, and impact. The sizes help to budget and control your marketing investment.
Pamphlet marketing 📜 is the lowest form of marketing. To balance reality and fun for players, we linked its price to a real-life cost element and exponentially increased ⬆️ the impact of marketing in-game. We used each country's average burger bike cost as the real-life cost element.
Depending on your chosen country, this results in a higher or lower pamphlet marketing cost.
The gif below shows the difference in cost for pamphlet marketing in Australia ($900), the United States ($575), and Canada ($800), respectively.
Tying the pamphlet marketing cost to a real-life cost element also allowed us to use it as the basis for costing the other forms of marketing.
Business Impact
The type and size of marketing activity you invest in impacts your Brand Strength. Your brand strength shows your company's popularity in a locality or city. It forms part of your Stand's Range of Influence.
A Stand's range of influence allows it to attract 🧲 more customers farther away from the Stand. We talked more about it in this episode.
In the image below, the food truck with the larger stand range (the blue one) will attract more customers than the one across the street.
Every company 🏢 starts with Zero brand strength. Over time, brand strength can increase to 150 points or decrease to -10 points, depending on marketing investments made and news events that affect the company's brand. Each type and size of marketing activity increases the Stand's brand strength by a fixed amount.
The Stand's brand strength in a locality at any given time is the sum of the impact of its marketing activities and any negative or positive events affecting the brand.
The brand, in turn, forms part of the Stand's range of influence based on this formula:
As the Stand's brand value grows 📈, its range of influence will widen, allowing it to attract more customers.
Impact on the Competition
The presence of competition introduces a new element to the brand formula. Recall that marketing is the only way to protect your brand and diminish that of the competition.
Here is how it works.
When you invest in marketing, the competition's brand suffers an equal deduction ⏬ in brand strength. The impact depends on the type and size of your investment and the competition's ongoing marketing activity (If any).
If there is more than one competitor, the deduction is equally distributed across all of them.
The same is true when the competition invests in marketing. Your brand strength suffers a reduction based on the type and size of the marketing investment. The brand formula with competition becomes:
Here's a sample marketing impact distribution and resulting brand strength among competitors in a locality. Event impact is not included in this table because, although they affect brand strength, they are random.
In the table, Player 1 invests in pamphlets 📜, social media 📱, and online 🌐 marketing. Player 2 invests in TV 📺 marketing, Player 3 in Online 🌐 marketing, and Player 4 in Radio 📻 marketing.
Although Player 1 is investing in 3 smaller forms of marketing, the impact from the competition’s marketing is driving down it’s brand strength.
Likewise for Players 3 and 4. Their marketing investment is not enough to withstand the competition’s marketing activities.
Player 2’s heavy investment in TV marketing is sufficiently maintaining its brand strength despite the activities of the others.
You can see that consistent marketing is critical to being successful in multiplayer. Experimenting with different combinations of marketing types and sizes can also provide a unique advantage against the competition.
By maintaining a solid investment in marketing, your food truck company will be able to attract new customers and outcompete other Stands in the city. Hopefully. 😉
That's it for this episode!
Don't forget to join our community to get these behind-the-scenes specials delivered directly to your inbox. Plus, we've got other exclusive perks waiting for you.
Live Long and Prosper 👋, Team Visionaries
Weekly Short Update #23 📰
Hello heroes, 🤗
New Implementations 🎁
User Interface
1. Implemented player progress level up 🔝 when mission ends. 2. Added player progress bar 📊 3. Player progression badge 📛 now shows on the Menu Screen according to player’s current level.
Environment
1. Added more food stands 2. Employee popups now display the employee’s portrait 🖼️ 3. Implemented sound effects 🎶 for:
When player selects a stand in the environment
Player progression level up 🔝
4. Added visual effects 💥 for:
Player profile display from Steam
Player progress bar 📊
General fixes and modifications 🛠️
1. Fixed the error in computing employee training costs. 🧮 2. Stopped the stand button for stand performance summary 📄 from showing other player's profit. 💰 3. Changed employee happiness stats to decimal places.
New Stands
Weekly Short Update #22 📰
Hello heroes, 🤗
New Implementations 🎁
Environment
Implemented sound effects 🎶 for:
Marketing attack and defence
When player buys or upgrades to a new stand
When player becomes profitable 💰
When player moves to a new location 🏙️
Mission tips 💡
Scotch’s 🐶 licking action
When player clicks the Dashboard button 🔲
General fixes and modifications 🛠️
1. Fixed errors preventing players from retrying 🔁 mission 2. 2. Stopped game events 🗞️ from referencing previous playthroughs. 3. Fixed error that caused stands to show in a position the player has moved from.
Weekly Short Update #21 📰
Hello heroes, 🤗
New Implementations 🎁
Environment
1. Implemented disappearing effect for Stands when moving or selling them. 2. Added animations for: Happy customer reaction 🕺 Scotch 🐶 liking 💖 player’s profile image. 3. Implemented visual effects for income at each stand as customers buy burgers.
General fixes and modifications 🛠️
1. Improved special effects for the selected stand. 2. Enabled auto stock 🔁 button when player changes recipe 🍔 3. Added reconnection notification in multiplayer mode. 4. Enabled the button to close alerts ❎ when animations are still playing. 5. Stopped customers' sprite colour lightening up because of added delay at day end.
Weekly Short Update #20 📰
Hello heroes, 🤗
New Implementations 🎁
Environment
1. Player icon 🎭 now shows as bankrupt after player chooses to go bankrupt in multiplayer. 2. Added visual effect 💥 to stand range to indicate changes ➕➖ in business stats. 3. Implemented a Profitable Badge 📛 to show when a selected view (city/location/stand) becomes profitable. 4. Added visual effect to indicate which stand a player has selected.
General fixes and modifications 🛠️
1. Stopped customer payment notifications from showing during night 🌃 2. Fixed client reconnection 🔁 bug in multiplayer. 3. Improved sync between start day sound effects and animation. 4. Baine 🕴️ now takes over bankrupt player’s business ️instead of Master Lee. 5. Fixed bug that causes host to go bankrupt in multiplayer when client goes bankrupt. 6. Fixed bug that stopped the retry game loop from working when players fail a mission 😭
Weekly Short Update #19 📰
Hello heroes, 🤗
New Implementations 🎁
User Interface
1. Added idle state to breaking news roller 🎰 before player selects preferred news 📰 channel. 2. Added a fixed highlight to the close button for all alerts. ⚠️
General fixes and modifications 🛠️
1. Added a text description 💭 to the multiplayer loading screen. 2. Tooltips and notifications now show the correct CEO name of players. 3. Fixed Bankruptcy status not showing in Multiplayer. 4. Disabled all relevant animations when players skip ⏭️ day.
Lest we forget, here’s wishing you and yours a happy lunar new year! 🥳
Simulating Economic Roller Coasters
Hello Heroes!
Today we are taking you behind the scenes to see how we generate economic cycles in the game. 😀
Let's dive right in!
The Importance of Adaptability
Successful entrepreneurship requires adaptability—the ability to roll with unexpected punches capable of knocking out your best-laid plans.
Imagine starting out as a food truck entrepreneur. You've carefully selected the best location, perfected your menu, and are just beginning to get into the flow of things. But just weeks into your launch, the economy takes a nose dive.
Suddenly, your carefully crafted plans and projections go up in smoke, and you are left scrambling to save your business.
This is a scenario many entrepreneurs have faced at some point, and the ability to quickly adapt their business strategy to unexpected economic realities is often what differentiates successful businesses from the rest.
Simulating Economic Impact
We decided to simulate the same phenomenon in the game to allow you to flex your strategic-thinking skills. Each city in the game has a different difficulty level based on many factors, including its economic situation 📉.
Like in real life, each city's economy in the game experiences business cycles of economic growth and downturn. Although an average cycle lasts about ten years, we thought it would be fun to implement business cycles in the game as one-year rotations 😎.
The city has nine customer segments with unique spending limits and habits. Their perceived value of your burger 🍔 & drink 🥤 increases or decreases depending on the economic situation.
Here's how we designed it.
The Design
Let's take Washington DC, as an example. The graph below shows the annual GDP growth for the US. Despite the micro tremors, the overall 10-year cycle is unmistakable. ⬇️
For our simulation, we picked the US's ten-year average GDP growth rate (2%) to generate the base case scenario of the economy:
The graph below illustrates the outcome of the formula.
As you strive to grow your business, the economic growth percentage will move across the blue dotted line to simulate economic growth or slow down.
Real economies also experience unexpected spikes and dips in the business cycle. We catered to this by implementing an events mechanic.
Based on the probability of occurrence, events such as technological breakthroughs 💻, international sports events 🏈, or trade wars and taxes will feed the simulation with spikes and dips.
In-game Impact
How does this impact the game? The population size is divided into outdoor and base population sizes. The outdoor population size is the total number of customers that are outdoors and willing to make a purchase. The base population size is the total number of customers, including those indoors.
The economic situation influences the outdoor population size. Many or fewer customers are willing to come out and spend depending on if the economy is in a growth phase or a downturn.
Each segment has a Base Economic Happiness, e.g. 40 units. Their current economic happiness per time will fluctuate upwards ↗️ or downwards ↘️ depending on the current economic condition.
Example of the calculation for the Parent segment.
Y generates the current economic happiness 😄 value of the Parent segment. You can see the difference between the outdoor and base population size as well as the current and base economic happiness in the customer segment tooltip.
Less population leads to fewer sales for your business ☹️. You will need to strategize, adjust your price, increase your marketing spending and improve your burger quality to drive sales. Additionally, having enough savings to weather the hard times really helps. 😉
That's it for this episode!
Don't forget to join our community to get these behind-the-scenes specials delivered directly to your inbox. Plus, we've got other exclusive perks waiting for you.
Live Long and Prosper 👋, Team Visionaries
Weekly Short Update #18 📰
Hello heroes, 🤗
New Implementations 🎁
User Interface
1. Multiplayer lobby now shows number of ready players 🔢 2. Added a progress bar to multiplayer loading screen indicating number of players that have completed loading. 3. Linked event triggers to different songs 🎶 and moods depending on the type of event 📰.
General fixes and modifications 🛠️
1. Synchronised various animations and elements to multiplayer client. 2. Removed delay for out-of-cash notification when it's initiated at the beginning of the day. 3. Added delay for order delivery 🚚 and food prep animations to avoid overcrowding the UI. 4. Updated stand range on Multiplayer client to increase ⬆️ or decrease ⬇️ based on customer feedback. 5. Skip the morning rooster 🐓 crow animation if the day is skipped. 6. Bankruptcy fixes:
Added a check for total resale value of upgrades. If the value is less than amount owed, the player goes bankrupt. 😲
Removed stock value 🏷️ check from bankruptcy accounting.
