Hello there, Emperors!👋
We all know that reviews are very important for any business venture that wants to become successful - after all without them there's no way your Food Truck will ever become famous! As that is the case we've worked extra hard on making sure that our reviewing system is extra clear and intuitive and today we'll talk a little bit about how that system works and the eternal struggle of balancing and fun that stems from it!
Let's jump into it!
As you might know we've been extensively playtesting our game throughout the last few months. If you ever asked yourself why the short answer to that question is because we believe that through your feedback we can grasp the very best idea for how our game should tackle all kinds of ideas that pop inside our heads. Throughout the playtests we've been also checking with you on the state of the reviewing system available in the game - the way the customers behave after eating your burgers and the scores you receive informing you about the quality of the burgers you've created and how your customers liked them.
It is through playtesting that we've discovered and understood that we need to find the right balance between relaxing gameplay, fun and cozy feeling of the game and the level of challenge presented within the game. How hard should it be to create the right burger? Short answer is "just enough to keep you entertained but not enough to make you annoyed".
And as such we've embarked upon a journey of finding the right reviewing system that concluded with finding just the right system that encompasses ease of access, understanding and fun we've strived to achieve.
Do you know that we used to have hearts to symbolize culinary preferences of our customers? It was, however, a bit too complicated - you aimed at having ingredients with the most numbers of heart but then the number was multiplied by some other factors and yadda yadda yadda - it was way too much for a simple and fun system!
After several discussions and feedback sessions with our community we decided on something different - a simple and elegant way of having stars be the main hero of our reviews.
Now when you'll play through the game you will notice that each of the client demographics available in the game have their culinary preferences neatly presented with a short but sweet information on how your star score will change if you decide to use them. Simple, right?
Let's take a look at tourists, for example, one of the demographics that are available in our game - just by looking at their demographic tab you will immediately see that they'd prefer to eat fruits or sea food and they really dislike vegetables. You don't have to spend too much time analyzing complicated graphs - one glance is enough to more or less understand the tastes of that particular demographic. Now you can enter your truck and craft the recipe that's gonna work exactly for them.
Our new system is also better at supporting strategists who'd prefer to minmax their trucks to offer meals that could potentially be of interest to several groups of customers. When no math is involved aside from counting the stars (and yes, you can say we'll be counting stars 🎵in this game!) it gets easier and simpler to check out whether the dish you're currently working on might also work on several other categories. Not to mention that you can always simply check the dish and see how it compares across all clients in the city at any time!
There are all kinds of things that can impact the number of stars you will get. Each ingredient has several tags that your customers might be looking for but that's not all. The processes your food will undergo can also influence the score. The overall flavor of the dish will often be more important for some people than some actual ingredients. And of course - the speed of meal preparation can also be taken into account - you've got your work cut out for you! Or... you'll cut it out yourself in the truck!
All ingredients can only hold up to 4 tags at the same time - sometimes you will however notice that there are ingredients who have only 2 or 3 tags present! That's a great opportunity to add some tags via all kinds of cooking processes! They have their own tags and products that undergo the particular process will receive the tags coming from the process. Even the ingredients who already got 4 tags are not exempt from this mechanic - they will however lose some of the tags they used to have before the process happened.
Serving speed and overall flavor of the dish, as we've said, also impacts the dish and how your customers will feel about them. As we continue the development we're also thinking about adding further interesting tags that will definitely influence the way you enjoy yourself in the Food Truck Empire. Who knows - some of the further levels might actually force you to keep pondering on the processes and ingredients you used and if it wouldn't be better if you didn't use them or changed the configuration of your automated assembly line existing within your food truck.
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