Making Our First Business Strategy Game More Accessible for Visually Impaired Players
Hello Intending Business Heroes!
Thanks for stopping by. Today, we wanted to share details of some of the improvements we are making to Business Heroes: Food Truck Simulation to make it more accessible to players with visual disabilities.
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. Just 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 that is usually being presented to the player.
Although Business Heroes is a business strategy game with a lot of embedded information, 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 moved to fix them.
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. 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.
UI Colour Switcher and Icon Contrast:
Players with colour vision deficiency 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.
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, so 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.
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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Definitely still work in progress, but our City View is coming out nicely. Still a ton of work left on both Day and Night views, but hey, we aren't where we started. 😉
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Business Heroes is an exciting turn-based business simulation game about growing and managing a small business's operations. Grow your busin
Hinata's mum is trying to help her get this job hoping that she'd find something else to love apart from those manga and comic books she's always buried in.
Would you hire Hinata as your Burger Stand Manager and help put her mum out of her misery?
Reshare for Yes, Comment for No.
(From the newest take on the Tycoon #Game genre - Business Heroes: Food Truck Simulation.)
#Jobs are not always easy to get. It's even tougher when you are trying to get your dream job in a city you are new to, with your savings running out fast.
This is the situation Fabio finds himself.
If you owned a burger stand, would you give Fabio this job? Hit the Share button for Yes, or Like for No.
Before you decide though, you might want to read his story and discover the REAL reason why an architecture graduate would want to work as a Burger Stand Manager.
Designing Business Dashboards that Improve Your In-Game Decision-Making Process.
Hi there, welcome to this episode of the Business Heroes Development log. Today I will talk about how we improved the decision-making process in Business Heroes by using dashboards that present essential information, from across your business, to you in one place.
Business Heroes: Food Truck Simulation is a single & multiplayer, turn-based food truck simulation game. The goal is for players to fulfill their entrepreneurial dreams by growing a successful food truck company that sells burgers and drinks. Players begin by choosing a capital city to play in. Then, armed with a single food cart, they start growing their business.
Smart businesspeople understand the importance of having the right information at their fingertips when it’s decision-making time. Successful entrepreneurs even go the extra mile to invest in developing unique Business Intelligence systems for their enterprises. Such systems place critical information at their disposal and enable swift decision making.
We thought to implement a similar feature in the game by creating unique dashboards for Stand and Staff Management. We wanted players to have a top-level or holistic view of all their Burger Stands and Employees, from where they could take critical business decisions.
You can see important business performance information from the Stand Management dashboard like burgers sold, location, profit/loss figures, existing recipes, and required upgrades for all your Burger Stands.
So, if you wanted to change prices for your stands, you could easily do it from the Stand Management Dashboard rather than going to each Burger Stand. Or if you wanted to effect a new burger recipe across your business or upgrade your stands, you could easily do it from here.
Similarly, we designed the Staff Management Dashboard to present vital information about all your employees quickly. You can see how much they are all paid, their current morale/happiness, and what training/upgrades they require.
This way, if you wanted to increase their salaries, give them a bonus, or upgrade their skill set, you wouldn’t need to go to each staff’s stand. You could quickly implement any of these decisions from the staff management dashboard.
It’s always great to have important business information grouped and presented to you in a visually appealing manner, right? Yeah, I thought so too. I also hope you enjoyed reading this.
You can also subscribe for development updates: http://eepurl.com/gZtyED
How you can create city-specific weather conditions in a Business Simulation Game that is close to the real thing.
Business Heroes: Food Truck #Simulation is a #businessgame that will cut across several major cities worldwide. Because it’s an outdoor business game, we had to design a weather system that accurately simulates each city's weather. This simulation will significantly impact player experience and game difficulty depending on the city they chose to run their business. In this article, you will discover how we designed the weather system in the #game to give you a city-specific weather experience that's close to the real thing.
Design Headaches from Hell: User Interfaces, Icons, and Neumorphism
Ever tried to design the UI of a business simulation game? Here’s how we did it.
So, my team and I have been working on a business simulation game and I thought to share some of the challenges we've faced in developing a User Interface that works for the game, and how we tackled them.
To give you a little perspective, The game is a single & multiplayer, turn-based food truck simulation game. The goal is for players to fulfill their entrepreneurial dreams by building a successful food truck company that sells burgers and drinks. Players begin by choosing a capital city to play in. Then, armed with a single food cart, they pick a location where they intend to start their business. To succeed, players must grow their business by making smart decisions based on weather and economic conditions, customer preference, unexpected occurrences, and stock cost/availability.
Developing a User Interface that would fit the game was tough. As we brainstormed, it quickly became evident to me that this was going to take longer than we anticipated.
The game is part of a series, and due to the goal of the series, we wanted players to focus on the game’s management and business decision-making side. So, we decided to go for a 2D environment within the game. Players can change locations and can only move in pre-selected locations within the game. Their customers, however, enjoy much more mobility.
We sacrificed the typical tycoon style building and extensive 3D navigation for the ability to provide players with an expansive view of the data they would require to strategize and make more business-related decisions.
This sacrifice quickly produced two new and significant UI design challenges.
The first was to ensure that the players don’t get lost or confused with several different decision-making popups showing up on their screens. Although we are aware that our players would probably appreciate a level of complexity in the UI, because games like Stellaris, Oxygen Not Included, and Europa 4 have very complex UI systems, I still thought we should tread carefully.
We eventually decided to streamline it to a very functional UI designed in a way that allows players easily navigate through all the decision-making processes. A pointer in this direction was that we came across repeated requests, during the game’s pre-development research, for a single location where players can see all the data and make all the top-level decisions. We implemented this by creating a stand-alone interface called the Dashboard UI. Here, players can see all the top-level data they require to make quick decisions when the business day closes.
We separated the Dashboard UI from the core gameplay area, where the real action is. In the core gameplay area, players create their recipes, make inventory purchases, buy stands, change locations, upgrade their staff skills, etc. I made sure we balanced the design so that the overall cursor movement is as minimal as possible. I think we managed to crack it because, currently, with just one look, players know where everything is.
Also, because it’s a business game, we wanted to have the accounts section always present. This way, players always know where they stand financially. However, I wanted it to be contextual so that, depending on the view you were looking at, you’d see the relevant financial information for that view. For instance, if you were looking at the City view, you’d see accounting information for your whole City. But if you were looking at a locality, you’d have accounting information for that locality.
Successfully implementing this financial contextualization in the UI is still a work in progress. I am sure sometimes the team wants to shoot me for being so particular about this.
The second significant UI design challenge was how to make the interface more intuitive. The game has so many interactive elements; hence, players need to identify what’s clickable or not quickly. This consideration ultimately ruled out a flat UI for us. Instead, we went for a design style called Neuomorphism. Because Neuomorphism is still a trending design style as at the time of this writing, I am anxious to see how our players react to our implementation of the concept in a business simulation game.
Finally, Icon design is also proving to be a tough nut to crack. We currently have over 120 icons in the game, with more to come. Because it is symbolism, we have to make sure everyone in different countries and cultures can interpret them. The icons are going to be easier to interpret on PC because of the hover detail. But I can already tell it is going to be a challenge in the mobile version. We are hoping to get more feedback about this during the testing phase, though.
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Your trusted guide, advisor, and mentor in #BusinessHeroes: Food Truck Simulation. As you attempt to grow your small business into a massive empire, will you take his advice or ignore him and rush into the unknown?
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