Hello, Venue Simulator

Hi, I'm Enes. This is my first game. I've played management games my whole life, and a few weeks ago I finally stopped saying "someday" and started making one. It's called Venue Simulator, and it's about running a music festival.

I have no studio, no team and no idea how long this will take. What I do have is a very clear picture in my head of the game I want to play, so I'm going to write down how it goes here, good days and bad days.

The idea

I love building games, but I always felt the best part of a festival isn't the building. It's the night itself, when something goes wrong and somebody has to deal with it. So I wanted a game where the concert isn't something you sit and watch. You have to run it.

You start with an empty field next to a village road and $5,000. You put down a stage, a bar, a food stand, a couple of toilets, connect everything to a generator and plan your first night. Then the gates open and you find out everything you forgot.

Honestly, my first version of the concert was boring. People walked in, music played, people walked out. I looked at it and thought "why would anyone play this?" That's when the radio came in, and with it everything going wrong at once.

What's in there so far

More than I expected, to be honest:

• Building: stages, bars, food stands, toilets, ticket booths, generators and power cables. Most buildings can be upgraded twice.
• Events: you book a local band (hard rock, heavy metal or electronic for now), set ticket and drink prices and open the gates.
• Staff: bartenders, cleaners, security, technicians and medics. You hire them, tell them where to work and send them where they're needed.
• Things going wrong: fights, people fainting, trash everywhere, dirty toilets, the bar running out of beer, short circuits. They come in over the radio and get worse if you ignore them.
• Getting better: every show ends with a report card. Good nights give you reputation stars, stars unlock bigger bands and buildings, and the village bank will lend you money if you're feeling brave.

That report card was humbling. The place was full, 50 out of 50, people were reasonably happy, and I still lost $109, mostly because seven staff cost me $530. I laughed, but it's exactly the kind of thing I want the game to be about.

The crowd scared me the most

A festival has to feel full. I was worried the game would choke after a few hundred people walking around, so before anything else I made a test: 100,000 visitors walking around at once. It ran at over 100 frames per second on my laptop. I may have done a small dance. Everything else is built on top of that.

What's next

Right now I'm working on electricity and water: proper power networks, pipes for the toilets, and later city connections and backup generators. After that I want more kinds of stalls (not everybody wants the same beer and burger) and visitors who actually have preferences.

I'll post here whenever something new works. There's an RSS feed if you want to follow along, and a Steam page is coming once the game looks a bit less like a prototype.

Thanks for reading, it means a lot.

— Enes