Greetings, 👋

Welcome to your latest update on our progress🕺. Today, we’d dive into how the game’s economic simulation works.

Infusing realism in the business mechanics was vital to us from the beginning. That’s why each city in the game has a different difficulty level based on the price of raw materials 🍅🍞, economic situation 📉, and the weather ⛈️.

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 events😎.

This mechanic adds a layer of consideration to your business strategy regarding making capital investments or taking new loans 🤑.

For instance, how do your investment plans change if your city’s population reduces spending because of a stock market crash 😱? And alternatively, increase their spending when the government implements fiscal stimulus? 💃

The city has nine customer segments with unique spending limits, and their perceived value of your burger 🍔 & drink 🥤 increases or decreases depending on the economic situation.

Here’s how we designed the economic simulation.

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:

As you strive to grow your business, the economic growth percentage will move across the blue dotted line to simulate an 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.

How does this impact the game? The population size 👨‍👩‍👧‍👦 changes along with the economic situation. Each segment has a Base Happiness, e.g. 50 units. Their current happiness per time will fluctuate upwards ↗️ or downwards ↘️ depending on the current economic condition.

Example of a calculation for a Manager segment.

Y generates the current happiness 😄 value of the Manager segment.

We calculate the result by adding Base Happiness and Current Happiness as a percentage and multiplying by population size to get the adjusted population size for the current economic condition.

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 today, Cheers 🥂

Don’t forget to Wishlist the game if you haven’t: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1429080/Business_Heroes_Food_Truck_Simulation/

Live Long and Prosper 👋,
Kunal & the team