Hello, 👋

It is no secret that the foundation of a food truck business’s success lies in the quality of its food. In a previous episode, we discussed the impact of food quality on your business’s success.

But the question remains, how do you develop a recipe that delights your customers and keeps them returning for more?

In this edition, we delve into the inner workings of the product development process and how you can discover the perfect combination of ingredients for every customer segment in the city.

Discovering Customer Needs 🍔

There are nine customer segments in the city. Each group has unique preferences for its burger. Your food quality goal is discovering the perfect recipe for your target customer segment.

During our second playtest, we discovered that giving players a preferred range for the perfect recipe of each customer segment drastically improved their playthrough.

We added this range in the tooltip of each customer segment:

The perfect recipe for all customer segments changes with each game, but the preference range stays the same.

The recipe has five ingredients with a minimum and maximum amount you can include per 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.

Depending on your target customer segment, you can use the preference range to decide your initial ingredient combo and modify it based on customer feedback.

Feedback Interpretation 👩‍🏫

We implemented a recipe feedback interpretation system to help you know exactly how much more or fewer ingredients your burger needs.

Customers give one of four types of food quality feedback whenever they buy a burger:

• Terrible burger – Yuck!
• Excess ingredient – The burger is overloaded.
• Insufficient ingredient – The burger is empty.
• Perfect recipe

Their feedback depends on the margin of difference between their perfect recipe and the number of ingredients in the burger they just bought.

Let’s take tomato slices, for example:

In the above example, 2 tomato slices are perfect for the customer segment. When no tomatoes are added to the recipe, the customer will give an ‘Insufficient’ ingredient feedback, meaning the slices should be increased by 2.

If 4 slices are added, the customer will give an ‘Excessive’ ingredient feedback, meaning the tomato slices should be reduced by 2.

When 5 slices are added, the customer will give a ‘Terrible Burger’ feedback, meaning the tomato slices should be reduced by 3.

Whenever the customer does not give a food quality feedback, the ingredients are close to the perfect recipe and only require one increment or reduction.

Feedback Prioritization ⬆⬇

Because the recipe feedback applies to all ingredients and we only wanted to show one per customer purchase, we had to prioritize them.

Terrible burger has the highest priority. Hence if any ingredient in the recipe meets that condition, the customer will give a terrible burger feedback, even if all other ingredients are excessive or insufficient.

Excess ingredient is next in priority, but only when there is an equal number of Insufficient ingredient feedback in the recipe. If either feedback is more in the recipe, it will show as the recipe feedback.

For instance, if a recipe has an excess of 2 ingredients and an insufficiency of 2 ingredients, the feedback shown is for ‘Excess’ ingredients.

But if a recipe has an insufficiency of 2 ingredients and an excess of 1, then the feedback shown is for ‘Insufficient’ ingredient.

We hope this prioritization will eliminate confusion, allow you to quickly resolve your recipe’s most severe problems, and get you closer to the perfect recipe faster.

And that’s a wrap 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

Greetings, 👋

It’s great to catch up with you again. Today’s episode is all about how the outdoor population size works. Let’s take a look. 😉

The City has an outdoor population size and a base population size.

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 City’s base population size is the sum of the base population sizes across all localities.

The base population size for each locality is shown below:

Because many prices in the game are similar to their real-life counterparts, and given the limited number of customers we could include in each locality, we implemented a customer effect scale of 1:10 to ensure businesses could become profitable.

In effect, each customer has an in-game impact of 10 customers. For example, the 60 customers in Street Corner have an effect equivalent to 600 customers.

The outdoor population size in each locality depends on the influence of three main factors, which are:

• General happiness of the population (Population Happiness)
• Economic well-being of the people (Economic Happiness)
• Random Events

The influence of any of these factors determines the outdoor population size in each locality and the City at large.

For example, the image below shows the difference between the outdoor and base population size in Glamour and Hip Street.

This difference results from the current Economic Happiness in the City being lower than expected.

Economic happiness affects all localities and effectively produces a current population for the City, 968, lower than the base, 1260.

We looked at the impact of economic happiness and random events in this episode and this episode, respectively, so let’s look at Population Happiness.

The population starts with an average Happiness level of 50. Their current happiness (Population Happiness) per time will fluctuate upwards ↗️ or downwards ↘️ depending on the outcome of the following formula:

From the above, you can see that weather plays a substantial role in the overall happiness of the population.

We explained how weather works in detail here.

Depending on the prevailing weather for the time of day, the following is the impact on Population Happiness:

When it’s sunny, the population happiness due to weather is maximum and therefore a higher outdoor population size is expected.

But as the weather worsens, population happiness due to weather reduces till the outdoor population drops to zero when there is a storm.

Whenever there is a lower outdoor population size, you will need to adjust your business strategy to operate sustainably.

And that’s a wrap 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