Whether your business is handling or running four wheels or running on four wheels, there are a few basic rules to follow. When you master these common factors, you will become really a business shark in an ocean of opportunities. Let's analyze two economic activities that may become yours even today: Food Truck and Gas Station.
Renown
Fame has different appearances and in Gas Station Simulator we like to call it "popularity". If an adventure on Route 66 is still ahead of you, popularity is a system that tracks feedback from your customers. Do not exceed the required amount of fuel while fulfilling the order. Check out each product carefully and do not scatter them on the floor. Take care of the gas station so that it is clean and its shelves are not empty. These and many other activities contribute to increased popularity, which means higher traffic, the possibility of further expanding and developing the gas station and unique visual rewards. For those who are struggling to reach the maximum popularity level, we hear you! We are working on a new way to increase popularity to make leveling more enjoyable.
For Food Truck Simulator, based on the experience and feedback in Gas Station Simulator, we have created a new system called “prestige” that approaches this topic slightly differently. There is nothing more sensitive than a customer with an empty belly, and as a chef and salesman you will meet many of them. Be careful because such a customer might be a ticking bomb that will damage your prestige when exploding. How to avoid it? Feed them properly. Keep an eye on the ingredients and don't make them wait too long. Take care of cleanliness! Nobody wants to eat a grilled burger that's wrapped in burnt fat. If you manage to do it, it will open up a whole host of new opportunities.
Time
If you thought you would have peace of mind at a gas station in the middle of nowhere, then you are almost right. The business beginnings are usually slow, and later on you can either take a break by closing the gas station or get help by hiring employees. Nevertheless, once you spread your wings and start offering fuel, a cool drink or a bathroom as the only place within dozens of miles, don't be surprised when a wave of customers floods you. May you be prepared for this in advance and have a warehouse full of products and tanks full of fuel. Time is not your ally, so keep an eye on it. In Food Truck Simulator, time management begins in the garage. Plan a route, analyze all strategic places, and when you are ready, start the engine and show off with your driving skills. If you manage to get to the supply store on time before the competition, you will get a better offer. Be late and pay full price like any other. The next stop? The selling point where the time and mass of hungry customers stand against your kitchen under your command.
Progress
This point applies to both your business and you personally. Let's start with the Food Truck. Traveling through the corners of the city, makes you discover new locations that will provide a greater business range. You meet new people, thanks to whom you will expand your service scope. Over time, your vehicle will become a better mobile kitchen, and you will become a better driver which will allow you to get to further places faster. However, you can also focus on any single selling point. Focus on your favorite type of kitchen, which will please both you and the consumer. Some say that a good cook is not one who has trained 10,000 dishes, but one who practiced a dish 10,000 times. And how to manage this in a desert? Las Vegas and Dubai were also built on empty sand. So remember the day you wake up for the first time as the owner of this not very spectacular abandoned gas station. Think of it a month later as you enter a huge and refurbished facility. Recall the initial silence when you hear the clamor of constant engines and people around you. When you go inside the workshop to save a customer's vacation or use the car wash to make sure someone's date goes well, think of the piles of sand that stood where these structures are now. The future is in your hands.
Express yourself
This is your business. You are your own boss and don't be afraid to show it in an artistic way. Whether it's a gas station or a food truck, you'll start your working day with a smile when you look at your handiwork with pride. There are plenty of customisation options in both games and we intend to add even more!
Gas Station Simulator is obviously available already and Food Truck Simulator will be released in few weeks on September, 14th:
As we mentioned in an earlier annoucement, we are right now making our first experiences with Steam’s Playtest feature with our other game, Food Truck Simulator. After only a couple of days, we are very satisfied with it and as mentioned back then, we wanted to see if that’s something that we might adapt for Gas Station Simulator in the future.
We now made the decision, that we definitely will. Starting most likely with the Shady Deals DLC, we will make it available in its then current state via Playtest ahead of release to get some feedback sooner and have enough time until release to put some of that feedback into the final product. While some things might not work fully yet, we believe giving at least a selected number of players access to the DLC way before its release makes a lot of sense to iron things out early on and get some things noticed before it’s too late.
Sure, a Playtest is not for everyone, it’s basically like a more streamlined beta test, but considering the amount of players that asked us for beta tests before Gas Station Simulator’s release, Steam’s Playtest feature seems like the perfect solution.
It wasn’t that we opposed to the concept of beta testing as such, just that organising it and its handling are quite a lot of work that would take time away from the already busy developers. With Food Truck Simulator’s Playtest we are seeing now how much less time is necessary to set it up and we will use Playtests a lot more frequently in the future.
The Playtest in Food Truck Simulator is still running, so you might want to participate in it to have a look how it works and what to expect. Just head over there and click the Request Access button.
And in case you have forgotten what Shady Deals is about, that’s a quite large DLC we are working on for Gas Station Simulator that will see, among many other things, the return of the uncle with a new business scheme:
As you might have noticed, a while ago we announces two other games that will expand the gas station “universe”: Road Diner Simulator and Motel Simulator. But it is not about just creating games using an existing brand, it’s about making them actually work together.
The folks working on Road Diner Simulator just posted their first DevLog and it outlines how these 3 games will work together when you have any 2 of these 3. Certainly a worthwhile read to see what the future holds for Gas Station Simulator as well:
Having all 3 games working together like this will also mean a lot of changes to Gas Station Simulator in the future and new content adapted from both other games in order to make it work. So even if you don’t get Road Diner Simulator and/or Motel Simulator once they become available, your Gas Station Simulator will still see some nice new things added on top of what we already have in the pipeline for the next 12 months or more.
How about having a food truck on the gas station? As you might be aware, the release of our Food Truck Simulator is just around the corner (September, 14th). This means the game is in testing and that involves the folks who are working on Gas Station Simulator having a closer look at it occasionally as well. And on one of those occasions they came up with an idea… yeah, of course they did.
“Wouldn’t it be fun to have a food truck on the gas station?” asked one of the developers. “You mean like a decoration or an event?” asked another in return. “Eh, yeah, we could do that, too. But I meant like having an actual food truck there that you control, that is another boost for popularity and provides some income.” was the unexpected answer. And then hell broke loose…
I will spare you the avalanche of expletives that ensued from other devs who heard the conversation or the finer points of treats, intimidation and borderline harassment involved in the process of making the idea take on an actual shape of a plan…
Anyway, after a lot of back and forth the idea really did take on some shape. What we were thinking was adding a food truck to the gas station that you can manage. You won’t have to cook or drive it like in Food Truck Simulator, since let’s face it: it would be far beyond the scope of the idea and that’s what Food Truck Simulator is for. Not to mention you are already busy running the gas station and handling the day-to-day tasks there and more are coming with new content later this year.
Instead, we figured we let you “just” manage the food truck. You will have to take care of its maintenance, make sure it has enough supply to prepare the food it sells and see that the guy doing it all is actually getting paid. We would add a map of the area and on that map there would be several locations in the vicinity and you would have to select when the food truck should be where to maximise its sales, pretty much like you have to do in Food Truck Simulator.
What we would do is grab some of the game logic from Food Truck Simulator when it comes to maintenance, supplies and locations and use them for this idea, as adding a food truck from scratch would just take too long to be a viable idea. Heck, we might as well steal some of their nice customisations while at it so you have to fix it up before it can be put to some use.
Food Truck Simulator has a pretty good demo you should check out to get a better idea how these things work and what we are writing about:
And this leads us back to the question: is this something you’d like to see us add to Gas Station Simulator? We have to be upfront about one thing though: adding the food truck might slightly delay the already planned new content for Gas Station Simulator. There is always something, hence us trying to get some feedback from the community to see if in your view, this idea is worth pursuing further.
Please use the Discuss button below to let us know.
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With the update to the Food Truck Simulator demo, it's time for the aforementioned Giveaway! If you're a Gas Station Simulator veteran, you shouldn't have any difficulty finding references to your game in Food Truck Simulator.
The only thing you have to do is to find elements from Gas Station Simulator, take a screenshot and paste it on one of our channels (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Discord) with the hashtag #foodtrucksimulator.
With a little bit of luck you'll find your game code for pickup on our Discord. Be fast and keep your eyes wide opened!
The updated Food Truck Simulator demo will be available today (27 July) at 10 AM PT/19 PM CET.
Only the day left on Gas Station Simulator's lowest price to date!
It's the bundle's last day on sale with a discount of 28%. That's the highest discount we ever did for the game and quite an opportunity to get Gas Station Simulator together with its recently released first DLC in case you don't have the game yet.
There might not be such a great deal on the game for a while.
Mark 27.07.2022 in your calendar as that’s when a gas station related content and giveaway starts when Food Truck Simulator updates its demo. Beside various improvements and request, we added a lot of gas station related things and easter eggs to the demo and the contest will be about finding those - right up the alley of the GSS community.
So knowing Gas Station Simulator is kinda essential in order to be able to truly compete. I mean there are some very obvious references that anyone who has seen a gameplay video of the game is likely to spot, but there are lots of not so obvious ones only those we really played Gas Station Simulator will recognise. It’s going to be fun :)
Not familiar with our Food Truck Simulator? Check it out and add it to your wishlist while at it and sign up for the upcoming Playtest before the game's launch:
Time for a small preview of an upcoming update to Gas Station Simulator. Despite Food Truck Simulator ramping up to its release in September and our Winter Survival entering Early Access soon after, Gas Station Simulator is still very high on the team’s priority list and we are working on new content and optimisations for while now. We reached a point where are pretty confident what will make its way into Update #7 of the game and that is a good point in time to let you know at least about some of those things. And we do have nice mix of things planed for you :)
Stability & Performance
Aside from various fixes, especially those related to random crash issues, we continued the work from Update #4 and major optimisation overhauls. We tackled both CPU and GPU optimisations as well as physics related performance issues. Those combined should greatly improve the performance of the game especially on medium and high spec systems.
CPU Optimisations
While the game isn’t really bottlenecked by the CPU in general, we addressed a lot of instances where the game on occasions got severely bottlenecked. Just for a moment or two, but that in turn caused the GPU performance to falter and then the recovery phase from those performance dips wasn’t short either. We rewrote a lot of code, especially in areas where the CPU is constantly kept busy to make some breathing room for the performance spikes that will occur no matter what - especially in the later stages of the game.
Depending on the system and CPU, we freed up even as much as 40% of CPU resources which is quite massive. This will not only result in overall better performance and more stable FPS, but also alleviate most of the massive performance spikes.
GPU Optimisations
With the optimisation on the CPU side, we are now seeing much more stable GPU performance. This in turn allows us to optimise GPU even more, since the performance spikes caused by the CPU are dealt with. This is still ongoing and while we are not certain that all the optimisations we planned in this area will make it into the upcoming Update #7, a lot of them will.
GPU performance will also benefit from another source. We are internally working on a native version of Gas Station Simulator for Macs and especially the changes required for Apple’s own silicon (M1/M2) are also beneficial performance-wise for the PC version of the game - especially on the low end of the machine spectrum. So when it comes to GPU performance, there will be something for every system tier.
New Features
While Update #7 is mostly about optimisations and stability of the game, there will also be new things when it comes to content. Here are some of the highlights you can look forward to:
An additional employee to help around the gas station.
Open and close areas of the gas station separately.
Remote accessing to the PC.
New boosts for popularity levels.
Yes, you will be able to not only access the PC inside the gas station from anyplace with a tablet like device, but you will be finally able to open or close each of the parking spots separately (which in turn are responsible for the customer influx at the cash register or the toilets), the car wash, fuel pumps (also separately) or the work spots in the garage.
We will give more details about the added features as we will be getting closer to the release of Update #7, but we hope what we already provided today enough for you to get a taste what’s coming and whet your appetite a little. Yes, the food pun is here for a reason as there will be some cool Food Truck Simulator related things that fit a gas station nicely added as well…
