Creating Business Dashboards that Improve In-Game Decision-Making
By Kunal Oogorah, founder Visionaries FZ LLC, an Indie Studio that creates business simulation games that inspire, entertain, and educate. Currently working on Business Heroes: Food Truck Simulation.
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.
