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!

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Live Long and Prosper ,
Team Visionaries

Successful food truck owners all know one thing. Poor food and service quality will kill a food truck business faster than you can say, “Rest in peace” 😵. This news update is about preventing your food truck company from death by poor service.

After every sale, customers give feedback about your Stand’s quality of service. This feedback increases ⬆️ or decreases ⬇️ the Stand’s total quality 🌟 depending on if it is good 👍 or bad 👎. Negative feedback shows you areas of the Stand that need improvement.

A business that consistently ignores negative quality feedback from its customers cannot expect to survive for long. This is because the Stand’s overall quality forms part of its Reputation. An excellent reputation allows a Stand to attract more customers farther away from it. You can read more about this here.

A higher Stand quality has a positive effect on Stand Reputation. So, what makes up Stand quality? A Stand’s overall quality is based on its Service Quality and Food Quality.

Service Quality

Service quality measures how a business’s service delivery compares to customer expectations. Quality service leaves a strong impression in the customer’s mind. 🤩

For a food truck, this means delivering speedy service in a friendly and helpful manner 😊. That’s why we divided Service Quality into service speed and customer service.

Service Speed 🏃💨

This measures how long it takes a Stand’s employee to serve customers. New Stand employees start with an average service speed.

You can improve their speed through training 🧑‍🏫, increased employee happiness 😁, and Stand upgrades 🦾.

Bad customer feedback 👎 and employee unhappiness 😞 will worsen your employee service speed. So it’s best to address them immediately.

When a Stand has two employees, the Stand’s service speed is the sum of both employees.

Service speed is inversely proportional to the time ⌚ employees take to serve customers. As service speed increases, the time (measured in milliseconds) to serve customers reduces.

We are using milliseconds because we compressed time in the simulation.

The formula for this relationship is:
Here’s a graph showing the result of the formula:
You can see that the time to serve a customer reduces at higher employee service speeds.

Customer Service 🏅

This shows the employee’s ability to charm customers. Excellent customer service guarantees positive feedback 👍 from customers.

Like service speed, new employees start with an average customer service rating. You can improve their rating through training and increased employee happiness.

Bad feedback 👎 and employee unhappiness 😞 will also worsen customer service if left unattended. Unlike service speed, there are no Stand upgrades to improve customer service.
The customer service quality for Stands with two employees is the average of both.

Improving Service Quality

One of the best ways to improve your food truck service quality is to train 🧑‍🏫 your employees. Training helps improve service speed and customer interaction.

Impact of Training on Service Speed

Employees start at training Level 0 and can be trained up to Level 6. Each new training level increases the employee’s service speed by a certain amount.
In the table below, you can see how different training levels impact service speed and the equivalent time it takes to serve a customer:

A new employee with zero training and no Stand upgrades has a service speed of 40. At this speed, it will take them 4256 milliseconds to serve one customer.

But at training level 4, it will take the employee only 3511 milliseconds 🤯 to serve a customer. As training and speed increase, service time reduces.

Impact of Training on Customer Service

Like service speed, each new training level increases the employee’s customer service by a certain amount (as illustrated in the earlier image). The table below shows the progression:

Happy employees, happy company. 😁

Employee happiness measures how enthusiastic and dedicated a worker feels toward their job. Happy employees are present, and they perform better. We kept things simple by tying the employee’s happiness to their salary and bonuses.

Employees begin with a certain happiness level. This level increases or decreases based on their salary, bonuses, and random events.

What’s the market rate got to do with it? 🤔

As in real life, there is an average salary expectation or market rate for the position of a food stand employee. This amount differs from city to city.

An employee’s happiness depends on the difference between their salary and the market rate. Paying your employees higher than the market rate will make them happier and vice versa.

What happens when employee happiness drops? 😓

When your employee’s happiness is average and above, they feel engaged and motivated. Their probability of not showing up for work is 0. As their happiness drops below average, they begin to lose motivation. So, their likelihood of not showing up for work increases.

The screenshot below shows Sophie being absent due to employee unhappiness.

Here’s the formula for calculating the effect on employee happiness due to the difference between their salary and the market rate:

And the result of the formula in a graph:

You can see that at 5% above the market rate, there is no effect on the employee’s happiness. Their happiness improves or worsens as the difference increases or decreases.

Happiness affects speed 🏃💨 and customer service 👍

The table below shows how employee happiness affects service speed and customer service.

Happier employees gain one extra point in speed and service quality across all training levels. They are faster and treat the customers better than their colleagues in the same training level.

Food Truck Upgrades 🛠️

Upgrades are extra facilities that help to improve a Stand’s performance, offering, or value. Various upgrades are available. From cash registers, sound systems, and Umbrellas ⛱️ to cooling fans, nitro boosters, and organic veggies 🫑🍅.

Some upgrades improve employee efficiency, the Stand’s appeal, or food quality, while others comfort or entertain customers.

Some Stands have certain upgrades built in (like in the above image), while they need to be bought for others. Such purchases are based on compatibility, as not all upgrades are compatible with each Stand. All upgrades with a padlock in the above image are not compatible with Isabella’s Stand.

Food Quality

Food quality is based on the taste and freshness of the Stand’s burgers. Every Stand starts with average food quality. As you change your burger recipe for your target customer segment, your food quality will increase or decrease depending on their feedback. Random events can also affect food quality positively or negatively.

The most satisfactory feedback customers can give is called the Perfect Recipe. Customers give this feedback when the ingredients in a burger recipe match their taste in size and composition. However, because customers have different tastes, the Perfect Recipe for each segment will differ.

Customer Experience and Feedback

Service Speed Feedback

Customers measure a Stand’s service speed by the amount of time ⌚ they are willing to wait to buy a burger 🍔. This time is called Customer Patience, and it’s different for each segment.

For instance, Students 🧑‍🎓, with limited cash and time to burn, can wait for 15000 milliseconds (about 90 minutes in real life) to be served. But Managers 🧑‍💼 will only wait for 6667 milliseconds (40 minutes in real life) before leaving.

Service speed 🏃💨 is one factor that determines how fast your burger queue moves. If the time to reach the front of the queue exceeds a customer’s patience, they will say that the wait is too long 😡 and leave. The image below shows a manager stomping off because the wait is too long for him.

But if the customer is first in line, they will buy the burger and say that the service is too slow 🐌.

Customers become more patient when the Stand has certain upgrades. Things like sound systems, TV screens, and cooling fans all help to improve patience.

Customer Service Feedback

It works the same way for customer service. Each customer segment has a minimum customer service need. Service below this threshold will attract bad customer service feedback 👎.

The customer service threshold for Parents is 25, and 50 for Tourists. If your employee’s customer service is below 50, Tourists will keep complaining about it. But as long as it is not below 25, Parents will be okay with it.

The gif below shows a Tourist leaving bad customer service feedback while buying a burger. Judging by the previous customer’s reaction, the burger is terrible, and they will complain about that too. 🤣

Food Quality Feedback

Recall that the Perfect Recipe for each customer segment is unique. The perfect recipe for one customer might be a burger with too many or too few ingredients for another. Customers judge your recipe by the quality and amount of ingredients in it.

When one or more ingredients are too much or too little for a customer, they will give an ‘excessive ingredient’ or ‘insufficient ingredient’ feedback. Both of which reduce your Stand’s quality.

For quality-conscious customers, their perfect recipe requires special ingredients like the softest buns. You will need a fresh bun maker installed on your Stand to produce these buns.

Conclusion

Delivering excellent quality in your food Stand begins with paying genuine attention to your recipe, employees, and customers 👨‍👩‍👧‍👦. When you prepare tasty recipes, train your employees, keep them happy, and make your customers comfortable, there will be no end to the positive feedback and recommendations your company receives from customers.

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Welcome to your latest update on our progress developing Business heroes, our business and economic simulation game for PC. While we’ve been spending a tremendous amount of time just debugging the food truck financial reports section 😭, we still managed to get work done on the Inventory section. Have a look.

Burger Inventory 🍔

The Burger Inventory section is where you manage all the stock you need for your burgers – Buns, Patties, Tomatoes, Lettuce, Cheese, and Sauces.

A quick run down of the sections:

Stock (Total) – Helps you track how much of each ingredient you have left in stock and your new total (in brackets) after you make an order.

Next Day’s Purchase Order – Where you order how much of each ingredient you need for the next business day.

Burger Counter – Shows the number of burgers you can make with your current ingredient inventory size.

Daily Cost and Excess Loss – Daily cost is the amount your next day’s order costs. Excess loss is the cost of all wasted ingredients. Ingredients get wasted when you order after your storage is full.

Storage Capacity – The brown bar represents how much storage your total stock has used up and how much is left.

Drinks 🥤

The drinks on offer in the game are a combination of water, soda, and juice. They serve as a complementary product that your business may sell to customers to increase revenue. The inventory management for drinks works nearly the same way as that for burgers.

Unlike burgers, however, drinks are not your business’s primary product. They require your food truck to be equipped with a cooler box or fridge before you can sell them.

Depending on the type you own, you can equip your food truck with a cooler box or fridge by going to the add-ons section (where all the equipment upgrades are for your food truck are).

After equipping your food truck with a means of cold storage, you can begin to sell drinks to your customers. Notice in the image above that some fridges also increase the shelf life of burgers and ingredients.

Be sure to keep an eye on your storage consumption, though. Drinks ordered after your cold storage is at full capacity will go to waste. And we certainly do not want that. 😉

Auto-stock 🤖

Inventory management is one of the activities you will be carrying out daily to ensure you have enough stock for the next day. You will frequently have to increase or decrease your stock to avoid buying more or less than what you need. For Burger Inventory, this means managing quantities for all your ingredients individually.

As you expand, it’s only normal that you will want to automate your inventory process. We implemented a pay-per-use solution called Auto-stock to provide this automation.

With one click, auto-stock helps you calculate the quantity of ingredients you require for the number of buns you have in stock. This way, you can quickly balance your order quantity across multiple stands, save time, and avoid overspending on inventory.

You will pay a fee every time you use the auto-stock function, so keep an eye on your account balance when you use it. If you are running low on cash, you can always manage your stock manually. 😊

After implementing this function in our economic simulation game, we were impressed with its impact on the gameplay experience. We are sure you’d appreciate the convenience it introduces to your management activities when you can afford to use it.

That’s it for this update, folks! To get these updates delivered to you first, directly to your inbox, please join our community. We’ve got other exclusive perks waiting for you.

Live Long and Prosper 👋,
Team Visionaries.

Welcome to our very first progress update of the year! We are glad to be back at it and excited to show you what we’ve been doing. We started implementing the food truck financial reports section. Have a look.

Financial Reports 📃

The financials section serves as your automated accounting system. It comes fitted with the main financial components of a real-world business to help you stay on top of your business. 🧐

The design for the date navigation system is still in progress, so keep your eyes on every other thing and pretend the odd looking, dark blue buttons don’t exist for now. 😁

Single-player 🎲

Tracking income, expenses, profit, and other line items over specified periods in single player is a breeze with the system.

Multiplayer 🎲🎲

After successfully deploying it for single-player in December, we resumed the year by integrating the financial system into multiplayer and fixing all the inevitable accounting bugs.

During the integration, amongst other things, we ensured that:

• All the correct financial models are updated during the business day so that accounting always tallies whenever you check it.
• All data values relating to your business’s financial history (Today, Year-to-date, Lifetime, etc.) get updated with each sale.
• The system updates the Day, Month, and Year financial views with each sale.

Performance Testing 🥊🌟

With that done, we proceeded to test data performance across many days to ensure optimum speed for generating financial reports under different conditions.

1,000 days: 6 stands test.

Result: We could make the speed a little better. 🤔The interaction with the date navigation system felt a little bit slower but generally, it’s not bad for data of such size (80 Mb).

That’s it for this update, folks! To get these updates delivered to you first, directly to your inbox, please join our community. We’ve got other exclusive perks waiting for you.

The entire team and I wish you an extremely productive 2022. We certainly look forward to a fantastic time together this year.

Live Long and Prosper 👋,
Team Visionaries.

It’s been a minute! We’ve been neck deep into developing Business Heroes: Food truck Simulation and so much has happened over the last few weeks. We can’t wait to share it all with you. Without further ado, let’s dive right into it. 👯‍♂️

Add-ons Management

Add-ons are equipment upgrades or enhancements that improve your service offering to customers when added to your burger stand. There are 21 available, ranging from Bluetooth speakers and freezers to stronger grills, super blowing fans, and even a nitro vehicle booster.

Not all add-ons are compatible with every stand though, and you can tell them apart by the blue padlock on some of them.

Want to make those impatient customers wait in line longer? Get a LED TV screen 📺 to entertain them. Need to cater to more diet-conscious customers? Get organic veggies and start using organic tomatoes 🍅, lettuce, and cheese 🧀 in your burgers.

Add-ons are a great way to deal with bad weather conditions and improve your customer satisfaction. Both of which ultimately improve your business profits. Knowing when to invest in purchasing them would play a big role in your success in this food truck simulation game.

Multiple Save/Load File System 💾

We worked on a multiple save/load files system and integrated it into the game’s User Interface. Multiple save/load file systems are a MUST today, and a game without it shouldn’t be released. 👀

How it works is, new games in Career mode are automatically saved after each business day. Currently, saved games display your company name, the number of stands you have, your cash balance at the time of your last save, and the date and time of the save.

Is there anything else you’d like to see shown? You can let us know in the comments.

Bug Alert 🐛

We also caught a bug that gets customers stuck in front of a stand and simultaneously removes the employee responsible for that stand. It’s a chase condition error that removes a dealing employee when trying to serve customers.
he bug probably likes seeing customers get frustrated 🤣. Fixing it has been a little bit tricky, but we’d get that bug annihilated soon enough. We certainly can’t have frustrated customers walking around the city.

New Team Member 🎉✨

Finally, we got to welcome a new member to the team! His name is Motawea and he is a talented developer based in Egypt. We are excited to have him join us as we bring Business Heroes to life. Please extend a warm welcome to him in the comments. 😉

To get these updates delivered to you first, directly to your inbox, please join our community. We’ve got other exclusive perks waiting for you.

That’s it for this update Heroes, catch you in two weeks…

Live Long and Prosper 👋,
Team Visionaries

This week, we sat down with the host of Indie Pod: An Indie Games Podcast in an exclusive interview. We talked about our journey making business simulation games for PC and the lessons we’ve learned developing Business Heroes.

Indie pod is a weekly podcast about Indie Games and their creators.

In this episode, we discussed the evolution of business management and strategy simulation games over the years and the experience we wanted you to have while playing Business Heroes.

You also get to hear more about how gaming influenced our journey (including how someone crashed their dad’s car after playing Need for Speed: Underground 😂) and how our Studio, Visionaries, operates.

Finally, we talk about our plans for other business simulation games for PC and how we intend to contribute to gaming by providing rich entertainment embedded with several real-world entrepreneurial practices.

You can listen to the full episode here.

After listening, the whole team would love to hear your thoughts, so please drop your comments in the discussions. We’d be looking out for it. 😉

P.S: Did you know we have a bi-weekly progress report we send out to special members of our community? In it we present a slightly closer look at our activities every 2 weeks. You can start receiving your updates on our progress by clicking here.