Gas Station Simulator News

Watch Mercus, one of the programmers on the project play the game's demo and comment on existing features and things to come in Gas Station Simulator.

Gas Station Simulator is all about running a gas station. An abandoned gas station you buy, renovate, build up and with time expand. All that while running it and serving customers to earn money for expanding it even further and adding new services.

In this demo we set you up with a gas station that is mostly renovated and already somewhat equipped that you have run for a day or two. Fill up cars, sell goods in your tiny gas station store, do some smaller car repairs, whatever it takes to keep customers satisfied. That means keeping the place clean, too.

With the limited scope of a demo we wanted to give you a good idea of how running a gas station in our game feels and let you experience some of the base mechanics you will see in the full game. While it’s just a tiny portion of things you’ll be able to do in Gas Station Simulator, we feel it provides a very nice experience and outlook onto the final product.
Give it a try and let us know how you liked it, we’d love to read your feedback.

And here some fresh in-game footage out of the demo:
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

It’s finally here, the demo for Gas Station Simulator!

To give you a better idea of the gameplay elements you will see in the game, we decided to not demo the start of the game, but use a gas station that has been already renovated and equipped a bit instead.

A cousin of yours is working on a gas station and needs to take off for a day of two, asking you to step in and take over for a bit. This way you get to experience some of the actual gameplay and see how you like it.

We also added a link to a survey at the end of the demo. If you have a couple of minutes, please help us improve the game by providing some feedback. The tried to keep the survey short and easy to navigate.

And no go and enjoy the demo!

The day's over. The bright, warm orange sun is slowly descending to hide itself behind the horizon. You see a ray of light sneak itself into the room as you check out the last customer for the time being, and throw your gaze out the window to watch the spectacle. And a spectacle it is, for sure.



When out in the desert, sky-watching happens to be one of the few things that give someone some relief and Gas Station Simulator aims not to disappoint. Using a dynamic, physics-based system to generate and control the sky, we can safely say that the lightwork in the game is as realistic as it can be, perhaps even more real than reality itself.
The sun creeps from east to west, replaced by the moon during night time. Each celestial body, including the major stars in the night sky, casts its light that falls towards the desert floor.
Clouds, dynamic and layered, cast shadows underneath the terrain they roll over, with darkness intensifying that much more for but a few seconds. Day turns to night, night turns to day, and the clouds roll along with the passage of time. If not for the plethora of customers, it's easy to find yourself mesmerized by the beauty of Gas Station Simulator's sky.



Wait, customers?
Were you anywhere else in the world, closing the establishment come nightfall seems a reasonable thing to do. But you're in a mid-western desert, and the rules work a little bit different here. For starters, 'closing hours' are a myth. As day turns to night, customers... don't stop coming. Maybe the traffic lessens, but there's many travelers out there playing it sensible and saving the long rides for night time, where the desert heat isn't liable to cook them alive in the confines of their vehicles. Tired, night riders will buy energy drinks or something to snack on, a different priority assortment than a tourist bus full of nuns.



But cherish your quiet moments. There's much going on in Gas Station Simulator, day-in and night-out. If you can spare but a while, sit down, enjoy the soft banjo tune and marvel at Hellen's slow and warm descent. That's what Joe suggests, at least.

When starting the development of a new game, you usually start with prioritizing the first features to prototype. Back when we began working on Gas Station Simulator, we did that as well, but ended up starting with a rather unexpected choice.
You’d think renovation, building upgrades, the plethora of customer interactions or the tasks at hand like filling up tanks or checking vehicles would be the choices to start with. And you would be right, except many of them rely on something very basic: how the customers arrive and how they get to where they want before you get to the tasks or interactions.

This means we had to tackle the vehicle AI first to see if we can get it as detailed as we wanted it to be, because how many other features would play out is going to rely on what the vehicle AI will be able to handle. The thing about vehicles and their behavior is, that like characters, you spot any imperfection and odd behavior immediately, because we are all so used to seeing vehicles in every situation every single day.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

We didn’t just want a customer to arrive at the gas station by moving their vehicle from A to B. We wanted them to do it naturally, meaning decrease speed when turning, slowing down when it gets more crowded or narrow, navigate obstacles like other customers parking badly etc. We also needed the AI to handle all the changing conditions that arise from the upgrades you will make to your gas station, like adding parking spaces and new parking lots.

Then there is the matter of a complex decision tree. The customer wants to fill his tank and get a snack, so he wants to get to a gas pump closest to the entrance and thus shop area. Or a customer who wants to fill up his tank arrives, but all the gas pumps are currently occupied. Not to mention the many events that will occasionally activate like a tour bus arriving and thus presenting a whole new challenge for you to manage and the AI to handle.

As we are now in the process of completing the last phase of the vehicle AI we are more than happy with what we achieved. It is more akin to something you’d expect from a city simulation game with traffic decisions, dynamic obstacle handling, lane changes, traffic lights support and shortcut handling. While a gas station seems nothing like a city, from a game logic and the AI’s point of view it actually is exactly like a city, just a lot smaller. The requirements in terms of fictionality however are the same.