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27 April 2023
Events: Expect the Unexpected
This episode about why we added events in our strategy game and how we did it. Dale Carnegie once said:
“People rarely succeed unless they have fun in what they are doing.”
From the beginning, we knew that because of the nature of Business Heroes, the game ran the risk of being an overly serious management game.
And we certainly didn’t want that.
So, we introduced the Events system to enhance the player’s excitement and entertainment while growing their food truck business.
You can think of the Events system like the news media in real life. Except that the news it delivers is improbable to happen in real life.
As players grow their food truck businesses, they will have to adapt and make quick decisions in response to these very unrealistic events. 😆
Design & Implementation
We divided the events into two categories, Good and Bad. Each day, the system generates a random number 🔢 that determines the chances of an event occurring the following day. 🌄
Depending on the number, the outcome can be a good event, no event, or a bad event.
In general, the system leans towards good events. We did that because the goal of the system is enjoyment, not frustration.
The news section pops up whenever there’s a new event, and players can select their preferred news channel from three choices.
Their selection determines the category of event they get.
Each event spans from a minimum of 1 day to a maximum of 10 days. For example, the event below is a 50% sale on all Upgrades that will last for 1 day.
Both event categories have 5 levels each. These levels determine the effect and frequency of the event. A level 2 good event has less positive effects on a business compared to a level 5 event, and is likely to happen more frequently than a level 5 event. The same is true for bad events.
Probability of Occurence
We also designed the system in such a way that the probability of getting a Level 1 or 2 event is higher than that of levels 3, 4, and 5.
The image below shows that the probability of occurrence of a Level 1 good event is 26/40 as against 2/40 for a Level 4 good event.
The events cause a percentage increase or decrease in a wide range of statistics, all of which are listed below:
For displayed stats, you can always see the event effect and duration in their tooltips.
Events can range from a massive discount on upgrades to the Nation discovering a cure for cancer.
Here are a few examples:
The events system is an exaggerated, gamified version of business reality designed to boost fun and enjoyment. We hope players find that it adds to their overall experience of the game.
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
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21 April 2023
Achieving Superior Service Speed ⏱️
Greetings, 👋
In the last episode, we looked at how to use upgrades to improve customer patience and reduce missed sales. Today you’ll discover how service speed upgrades can help improve employee speed, resulting in even more reductions in missed sales.
Let’s dive right in.
Service Speed Overview
Employee service speed measures how long it takes a Stand’s employee to serve customers. For Stands with two employees, the Stand’s service speed is the sum of both employees.
Service speed is inversely proportional to the time ⌚ taken to serve customers (service time). As service speed increases ⏫, the service time reduces ⏬.
Here is how it looks on a graph:
Business Impact
Customers face either of two scenarios when they visit your food stand. It’s either there is a queue, or there isn’t.
If there is no queue, but the service time exceeds their patience, they will give a ‘slow service’ feedback after buying.
When there is a queue, but they are getting served when their patience is exceeded, customers will only give a ‘slow service’ feedback if the wait time plus service time is more than their patience.
Slow service feedback negatively affects a food stand’s overall quality.
You can improve service speed through training, increased employee happiness, and stand upgrades.
For a deeper dive into the impact of training and employee happiness on service speed, you can read this episode on service quality and this one on employee happiness.
Service Speed Upgrades
There are three food stand upgrades that help to improve employee efficiency, and thus service speed.
Here’s how they impact service speed:
Just like customer patience upgrades, service speed upgrades are stand-specific. You can see the full compatibility chart for the service speed upgrades below:
Decisions, Decisions, Decisions.
Because the burger bike is incompatible with any of the service speed upgrades, owners will need to invest more in employee training and happiness to improve speed.
Achieving faster service speeds can maximize sales and reduce negative feedback by minimizing customer wait times. How you allocate resources to achieve this will depend on the truck you own, the empty upgrade slots available, and how much cash you have.
Still, you might need more than upgrades and training when targeting more affluent customers. You just might need to invest in a brand new truck.
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
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11 April 2023
How Price-Sensitivity Affects Sales
Pricing is a key factor in any business strategy game. In Business Heroes, it affects how customers interact with food stands. Your pricing strategy is a crucial aspect of the business model and greatly impacts customers’ buying decisions.
Decision Design
Some customers are more sensitive to the price of burgers than others. For instance, students, parents, and Staff have lower disposable incomes than the other segments. For them, affordability/price is a big part of buying.
Other factors that influence buying decisions in the game are:
– Time of day
– How appealing the Stand looks
– The food and service quality of the Stand
– Brand popularity of the business
These customers will shy away from your stand if they consider your burger to be too expensive. How do they decide what’s expensive and what’s not?
Utility Value
This is where utility value kicks in. They compare the cost of your burger to the cost of alternatives, such as a homemade burger, and decide based on which option offers the best value for their money.
If the cost of buying all the ingredients plus the time and effort to make the burger themselves is significantly less than the burger price, they will likely consider it expensive.
But as the difference between the burger’s price and the cost of the homemade option reduces, it will seem more affordable to them, and their likelihood of buying the burger will be higher.
Determining Price Sensitivity
To show you how it works, let’s take a closer look at how pricing affects the buying behaviour of the Students segment.
The formula we used:
This results in a graph that shows how the probability of Students buying a burger drops as the percentage difference between the burger price and homemade cost increases:
You can see that Students are very price sensitive as their purchase probability begins to drop at a very low percentage price difference between buying the burger or making it at home.
The graph is different for each customer segment. Some customers like Fit-ones and Managers have a high purchase probability even at a price difference above 200%!
This is because their buying decision is based more on stand appeal, food/service quality, brand name recognition, etc., than price.
The key to maximizing sales is to consider the target market’s price sensitivity when setting menu prices.
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
Follow For More
11 April 2023
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 of 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
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7 April 2023
The link between customer patience and sales 💰
Hello, 👋
You may have heard the phrase “time is money” more times than you can count.
As a food truck entrepreneur, while increasing your efficiency is a great way to boost your profits, there’s another factor that can have an equally significant impact on your bottom line: getting customers to wait longer to buy food from your food truck.
Today’s episode is about how this plays out in the game.
Customers have a default time range for waiting to get their food. This duration is called Customer Patience. Each customer segment’s patience is unique. Depending on their lifestyle and daily activities, their default time is more or less.
You can see the default time for each customer segment below. Everything is measured in Milliseconds in-game time, so you can quickly notice the differences.
When customers decide to buy burgers from your stand, and there is a queue, they wait until their default patience time is exceeded.
When that happens, and they still haven’t gotten to the front of the queue, they will leave and give a ‘wait is too long feedback’.
Customers lost due to a long wait time counts as a missed sale in the Key Performance Indicator section.
Temperature and Weather are the two significant factors that impact customer patience. Customers become impatient when the weather or temperature is unfavourable.
The effect of temperature and weather on the default patience of all customer segments can be seen in the following table:
You can invest in food stand upgrades and employee training to avoid losing customers due to a long wait time and/or bad weather.
Seven food stand upgrades help to increase customer patience. Some entertain customers, while others reduce the weather effect on customers.
Here’s how each of the seven upgrades impact customer patience:
Customer patience upgrades are stand-specific, as some are incompatible with other food stands.
More expensive food stands have wider upgrade compatibility than the less expensive ones. Also, the number of upgrade slots available for each food stand is limited.
For example, here is the compatibility chart for the Burger Bike, Mini Trailer, and Burger Master food stands, respectively, each with three upgrade slots.
The Burger Bike clearly has fewer compatibility options for customer patience upgrades than the Mini Trailer and Burger Master.
So, when running your business with the Burger Bike, investing in improving service speed might be a good idea to avoid losing customers to long wait time.
In summary, increasing customer patience through upgrades or reducing their wait time through faster service speeds is one secret to maximizing sales.
But knowing when to invest in the right combination of upgrades and employee training to produce the best customer outcome makes all the difference in the world.
In the next edition, we’ll take a closer look at how upgrades and employee training can help reduce missed sales.
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