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.
Tactical RTS about firefighters is out now!
Our friends at PixelCrow have released their tactical RTS about firefighters - Fire Commander. The game is available out now!
See what it means to face the fire. Command a firefighting unit in an exciting tactical RTS. Save lives, manage your water supplies and care for your team in 30+ missions.
The game now offers you a 15% launch discount. You will also be able to save extra in numerous Complete the Set bundles with fantastic partner studios. The available games include Gas Station Simulator!
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…
Join the Food truck Simulator playtests!
We would like to remind you that you can still sign up for the Playtests for Food Truck SImulator, which will start at the beginning of August.
You will be able to try out new features and additions that we have created and have a real impact on the final shape of the game.
Since the summer at the gas station’s desert lasts the whole year, we don’t want to limit the summer sale to just 2 weeks and go for the whole 4 weeks. We are extending the 22% off the regular price offer on Gas Station Simulator from July, 7th all the way to July, 21st!
And we will give you some insights next week into what is happening with the game on our end as we are working on quite a few things that you will be interested in!
Hotfix #5 for Update #6
Just a quick hotfix for update #6 that just became available addressing the following issue:
Fixes an issue with disappearing hanging spots in the gas station that prevented players from hanging decorations properly.
