Devlog #2: Cooking up the metagame

Hello burger lovers! Now that our burger design & customer request systems are in a good place, we’ve been focusing on what managing your truck might look like - aka, the metagame.

😋 Making the game feel more “full”

Keeping the balance between ‘giving the player enough levers to pull’ whilst keeping within our casual management sim genre has been an interesting design challenge.

Our catchphrase with Burger Bois has always been ‘flavor not labor’, so we wanted to make sure whatever we design here doesn’t feel like work to play. This is Patty’s dayjob, but it shouldn’t feel like the player’s dayjob!

Part of this process has involved researching reference games like Good Pizza Great Pizza, Sticky Business, Potionomics, and Potion Craft, to get a feel for what might work well with a Burger Bois flavor. Our notes from those sessions helped us brainstorm the wider game loop!

😅 Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should

Once we’d prototyped these new features & tested them with our core audience, we asked ourselves: are these the right fit for our casual management sim game?

When we started the project we established three core pillars:

• Real-world transferable ingredient knowledge

• Reward experimentation

• Weird and delightful

Comparing each part of the new metagame to those pillars helped us to identify what to keep, and what to cut. 🔪🔪🔪

One feature we were considering cutting fell squarely into the ‘weird and delightful’ bucket, so we decided to keep that on and re-tool it to better fit the game. Another feature accidentally punished players for experimenting, so that hit the chopping block! (Maybe we’ll bring it back for an optional game mode though, who knows.)

👀 So what’s in the metagame, then? 

We’re keeping the details hush hush for now, but the ideas we’ve been exploring include:

• Time management without timers

• Finding the balance between practicality and the joy of discovery with stocking new ingredients

• Ways to influence your business beyond just serving customers

• Social media’s role in indie hospitality success

• The intersection between your truck, and the places you park it

• Goofing off at work can be good for you, actually

When we’ve got more to share on that front, you’ll be the first to know!

🙏 Thanks for reading!

We hope you’ve enjoyed this lil exploration of our process, and thank you for your continued support of Burger Bois. 🥰

Until next time,
Jess, Alex, Jackal, Stevi & Anthony