Fancy Restaurant
A soft-launched hybrid-casual restaurant management game in the "My Perfect Hotel" lane — shipped to 300K+ downloads. I built the management loop, the economy, the upgrade and production systems, and iterated the whole thing against live KPI data over a 7-month soft launch at Tolian Games.
- Core Loop: Seat customers, serve food, collect tips, then reinvest to unlock and upgrade tables — a tight earn-and-spend cycle driven by a joystick + stack-carry mechanic.
- Automation Fantasy: Hire waiters, food runners, hosts and cooks so the restaurant increasingly runs itself — the satisfaction of watching a machine you built hum along.
- Aspiration: Progress unlocks new themed restaurants — American Diner, Sushi, Italian, Chinese, Fine Dining — each with its own props, dishes and special tables.
- WOW Moment: Serving candles & wine dims the room into warm candle-lit ambiance, rewarding the player for upselling.
Restaurant upgrades (purchase discounts, tip %, reservation income, special-request bonuses) and Staff upgrades (player/waiter stack counts, plus player/waiter/host/cook speeds) — two parallel progression trees feeding one currency.
Raw materials trucked into a counter → cooking stations → intermediate & final dishes, with real recipe chains (Flour + Egg → Pancake, Dough + Cheese → Pizza). Carriers can be hired to automate each hop.
Bars, music stages, drive-thrus, soda machines, sushi bars and coin fountains each act as a distinct mini-economy. A later redesign split the loop into timed "days"/phases with predesigned client schedules, per-client wait timers and serve goals.
- Shipped & Scaled: Soft-launched and grew to 300K+ downloads, validating the core loop in the live market.
- KPI-Driven Iteration: Ran 5 scope iterations over 7 months, each steered by level-funnel reports — e.g. shortening Section 2 and reordering unlocks after the funnel exposed drop-off at the Level 12 event.
- Monetization Design: Built a rewarded-video economy tuned so non-RV players get +15-20 min of grind while RV watchers keep pace — RVs for x3 phase rewards, continue-on-fail, and temporary carry-capacity boosts.
- Retention Mechanic: Added a win-streak multiplier (x1.2 → x3, resets on a loss) to reward consistent play.