Posts In: Development
1 October 2021
Exclusive Interview with Indie Pod: An Indie Games Podcast 🎙
Hello,
Great to catch up with you again. This week, we sat down with the host of Indie Pod: An Indie Games Podcast to talk about our journey developing Business Heroes: Food Truck Simulation and the lessons we’ve learned.
Indie Pod is a weekly podcast about Indie Games and their creators.
In this episode, we discussed the evolution of management 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 the future 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: https://podbay.fm/p/indie-pod-an-indie-games-podcast/e/1632304800
After listening, the whole team and I would love to hear your thoughts, so please send me a reply. I’d be looking out for it. 😉
That’s it for today. Catch you in 2 weeks…
Live Long and Prosper 👋,
Kunal & the team
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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.
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We’ve been spending some time finishing up the economic mechanics of our food trucka strategy game for PC, Business Heroes: Food Truck Simulation. We wanted you to have a sneak peek of how the game’s country selection system 🌎 works and the economic mechanics behind it.
I can already hear you thinking, ‘I hope this is more than just an addition of different flags and currency symbols for aesthetics’.
It is 😁.
The system contains the core economic mechanic of the game. In single player, you can start your business in any capital city of your choice. To change cities, you need to start a new game because each city has a different difficulty level. The difficulty level is based on, amongst other things, the price of raw materials🍅🥬🍞, the country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP), and economic situation.
Food Truck Strategy Game Mechanics
Economies around the world have business cycles consisting of periods of economic growth and downturn. Although a real-life cycle lasts an average of ten years, we limited it to a 1-year cycle in our food truck strategy game.
Some of the effects of the system on gameplay are:
– A difference in the price of raw materials from city to city.
– Changes in population spending pattern due to economic events.
– Changes in outdoor population size due to the current economic situation.
For example, your city’s population might reduce their spending because of a stock market crash 📉. Or they may increase their spending when the government implements fiscal stimulus 💵.
Also, the population has a base happiness level 🥳. Depending on the current economic situation, their happiness will either go up or down. When it goes up 🕺💃, more people are on the street, and you can make more profits during this period. When it goes down 😰, it gets more challenging for businesses.
As an astute entrepreneur, you should strategize your capital investment or loans to match current economic conditions. Sometimes, the only remedy is to have enough savings 💰 to go through hard cycles.
That’s it for today. Catch you later…
Live Long and Prosper 👋,
Team Visionaries
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.
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17 September 2021
Country Selection 🌎
Hello,
It’s been two weeks of intense work on the game, and I am certainly glad to reach out to you again. We spent the bulk of our time finishing up the game’s country selection system 🌎 and getting it to work properly.
I can already hear you thinking, ‘I hope this is more than just an addition of different flags and currency symbols for aesthetics’.
It is 😁. The system contains the core economic mechanic of the game. In single player, you can start your business in any capital city of your choice. To change cities, you need to start a new game because each city has a different difficulty level. The difficulty level is based on, amongst other things, the price of raw materials🍅🥬🍞, the country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP), and economic situation.
Economies around the world have business cycles consisting of periods of economic growth and downturn. Although a real-life cycle lasts an average of ten years, we limited it to a 1-year cycle in the game.
Some of the effects of the system on gameplay are:
– A difference in the price of raw materials from city to city.
– Changes in population spending pattern due to economic events.
– Changes in outdoor population size due to the current economic situation.
For example, your city’s population might reduce their spending because of a stock market crash 📉. Or they may increase their spending when the government implements fiscal stimulus 💵.
Also, the population has a base happiness level 🥳. Depending on the current economic situation, their happiness will either go up or down. When it goes up 🕺💃, more people are on the street, and you can make more profits during this period. When it goes down 😰, it gets more challenging for businesses.
As an astute entrepreneur, you should strategize your capital investment or loans to match current economic conditions. Sometimes, the only remedy is to have enough savings 💰 to go through hard cycles.
That’s it for today. Catch you in 2 weeks…
Live Long and Prosper 👋,
Kunal & the team
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3 September 2021
Investing in Marketing 💹
Hello,
Great to catch up with you once again. We’ve spent the last two weeks implementing the marketing section of the game. Marketing 💹 is an effective way of attracting more customers to your business and the only way to compete with AI or other players for market share.
There are five marketing options available, and you can decide how much you want to invest in any of them. Or choose not to invest in marketing at all…😨
Pamphlet 📰 and Social Media 📲 advertising are local marketing options. Use them to attract customers to your business within a single location.
Online 🌐, Radio 📻, and TV 📺 advertising are city-wide marketing options. They help you attract more customers to your business across the City. Of course, they are more expensive as you’d imagine.
We made sure to balance the impact of marketing activities with your food quality and customer service rating. This way, investing in marketing when your food and customer service quality is excellent will yield a higher return on investment. As in real life, marketing, food quality, and customer service should all contribute to growing a solid brand. 😎
That’s it for today. Catch you in 2 weeks…
Live Long and Prosper 👋,
Kunal & the team
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30 August 2021
Game Update: Weather, Customers, and More.
It feels really great to catch up with you again. Thanks for following us on this journey of making our entertaining food truck entrepreneur game called Business Heroes: Food Truck Simulation. Here are some of the improvements we’ve made on the game over the last few weeks:
Game Weather Conditions 🌨⛈
We continued integrating the weather system and all its associated special effects. Here are the main implementations:
– Population dresses for bad weather (rain/snow)
– Bad weather condition reflects in population size and mood.
It’s still very much work in progress as we are trying to balance the moody look of the environment when it rains/snows with the overall upbeat experience of the game.
Customer Interactions 🤼
Your customer base consists of nine groups of people in the City. They are all particular about how your business can provide a food service 🍔🥂 that matches their lifestyle.
For example, Tourists want more cheese, sauces, patty, and less salad in their burgers. Staff and Managers are impatient with queues.😠 To keep them satisfied, you have to do something about long lines at your burger stand.
We’ve implemented their distinct characteristics and we hope you’d have fun trying to discover and meet their needs.
Marketing 💹
Marketing is an effective way of attracting more customers to your business and the only way to compete with AI or other players in the game for market share.
There are five marketing options available, and you can decide how much you want to invest in any of them. Or choose not to invest in marketing at all…😨
Pamphlet 📰 and Social Media 📲 advertising are local marketing options. Use them to attract customers to your business within a single location.
Online 🌐, Radio 📻, and TV 📺 advertising are city-wide marketing options. They help you attract more customers to your business across the City. Of course, they are more expensive as you’d imagine.
We made sure to balance the impact of marketing activities with your food quality and customer service rating. This way, investing in marketing when your food and customer service quality is excellent will yield a higher return on investment. As in real life, marketing, food quality, and customer service should all contribute to growing your brand in our food truck entrepreneur game. 😎
That’s it for this update Heroes, catch you in two weeks…
Live Long and Prosper 👋,
Team Visionaries.
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.
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20 August 2021
Customer Segments 👨👩👧👦
Hello,
We are sure you must have seen all the people walking around in the game clips and wondered about them. Today we will be sharing more insight into the nature of the game’s population. Nine groups of people live in the City. They are all particular about how your business can provide a food service 🍔🥂 that matches their lifestyle.
For example, Students are more concerned with your burger’s price than how healthy or nutritious it is. Fit Ones care more about the burger’s quality than its relatively low cost.
Parents prefer a burger package with more sauces because they are all about value for money.🛍 Environmentalists are wary of too much cheese and meat. They would pay more for a salad-filled burger that tastes great.
Tourists want more cheese, sauces, patty, and less salad in their burgers. Staff and Managers are impatient with queues.😠 To keep them satisfied, you have to do something about long lines at your burger stand.
Your ability to understand the primary needs of each group and provide burger services that meet those needs will play a massive role in your business’ survival. 💰
That’s it for today. Catch you in 2 weeks…
Live Long and Prosper 👋,
Kunal & the team
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23 July 2021
Weather Visual Effects. ☁
Hello,
Here’s your brief round-up of what we’ve been working on.
We continued working on the weather system and how it appears when it rains/snows. Because of the role weather plays in the game (it affects the outdoor population size and their mood), it was important to get the water puddles and snow to look perfect when they settle on the ground.
It was a bit tricky, but we ended up re-slicing all the city locations to get it to look just right.
It looks pretty good now though.
Catch up in 2 weeks…
Live Long and Prosper 👋,
Kunal & the team
Follow For More
9 July 2021
In-game music 🎼
Hello 😁,
This week, we spent some time implementing the game’s music and audio effects. Created by genius music composer David Hollandsworth, the game’s music is a unique blend of uplifting and relaxing tunes. Uplifting to help you feel inspired, motivated, and optimistic while growing your business and relaxing to put you in a chill, calm, and mellow state of mind.
David’s music has been used across many channels like CBS, Discovery, Animal Planet, VH1, NBC Sports, History Channel, etc. He didn’t fail to add his touch of brilliance to the game.
Enjoy these two samples:
Till next week!
Live long and prosper,
Kunal and the team.
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Hi there, thanks for stopping by. This post is about some of the improvements we made to Business Heroes to make it more accessible to players with visual disabilities. Statistics show that about 8% of all men (1 in 12 men) and about 0.5% of all women (1 in 200 women) suffer from color vision deficiency. To put that in perspective, that’s about 300 million people living with colour blindness.
Adding the number of people living with other types of vision impairments to that number made us realize something critical. We had to take accessibility concerns very seriously in developing ‘Business Heroes: Food Truck Simulation.’ We spoke a little about this here, but we thought to provide more details in this post.
We wish we could tell you that we designed Business Heroes to be more accessible from the start. But we didn’t. If not for the contributions and feedback we received from Redditors and other community members, we probably would have missed the accessibility issues in the UI until it was too late.
Anyone with low vision or even someone just trying to play complex strategy games on a smaller pc screen will attest to the difficulty of seeing some game elements. Like in the first version of our UI shown above, these games are particularly notorious for having smaller buttons and text because of the sheer amount of information usually presented to the player. Although Business Heroes is a business strategy game with many embedded data, we still wanted players with vision-related challenges to have an enjoyable experience playing the game.
So, when the community alerted us to the problems with the initial colours, sizes, and contrasts we had used in the UI, we knew we had to make Business Heroes more accessible. Fixing the accessibility issues eventually led to redesigning the entire UI. While this added an additional year to our development, we are pleased with our decision. We are optimistic that choosing to implement the following design decisions would enable far more players enjoy the game better.
Larger Buttons and Text Sizes:
We started off by redesigning the button and text size to also work for players with impaired vision. We redesigned the UI layout to create more space for larger buttons, and we moved several components to a new window entirely.
Making the text size work for everyone was a particularly tough nut to crack. We had to consider the impact language translation would have on the interface text and spacing. That’s because we will be releasing the game in several languages. While we could not implement a solution that worked for all the text, we were able to allow players enlarge 90% of the game text to 24 points.
We also stuck with a font choice and text contrast design scheme that made all the information in the UI and environment easy to read.
UI Colour Switcher and Icon Contrast:
For players with colour vision deficiency, we implemented a design option that accommodates their unique needs and works for everyone else. Players can switch the UI colour from yellow to dark blue depending on their visibility requirements.
We also needed to reduce the potential effect of the UI looking crowded due to too many colours. To do this, we kept inactive icons at 50% opacity by default. You can see their full colour when you place your mouse on them. We also included a function that allows you increase or decrease icon opacity as much as you like. This also has the added advantage of improving the contrast scheme of the UI.
Plus, we also applied shapes to the different player colours to distinguish players and their competition. This way, players would not have to rely solely on colour to differentiate between other players.
Game Music Controls
One way we tried to cater to players with hearing symptoms is to give players control of the music volume in the game. We separated the music sound from the gameplay sound. Players can turn it down or turn it off completely.
Detailed Tooltips:
Finally, we also implemented a detailed tooltip and business guide feature. This is to make the game easier for non-gamers, new gamers, and teenagers in general. To prevent players from feeling overwhelmed with the UI, we included clear and concise explanations. All the player has to do is mouse over it and viola!
Many young people might be seeing the business terms and concepts in the game for the first time. We included a business guide that provides deeper insights into the meaning of the concepts and business terms used. This way, players will never have to wonder about any aspect of the game while implementing their business strategy.
We sincerely hope you enjoyed reading this as much as we enjoyed sharing it. We’d love to read your thoughts, so don’t hesitate to share. Thanks!
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