This is great write-up and it's great that we can use AI tools to peek behind the curtain of how games like these were made.
Hopefully it gives more people a creative kick and we see a revival of more games inspired by some of those game mechanism and potentially even move away from using the well-known set of engines to build games with.
Amazing post, I loved this game as a kid.
Interesting that the Pizza scoring rules are that simple. I remember that the in-game encyclopedia said something that kids and teens prefer big portion sizes. This led me to always create a Pizza that just had an entire fried chicken on it, as it was easy to reproduce, made a lot of money (big ingredient costs = big margins), and gave good ratings.
And I definitely noticed that Pizzas covered with an even tomato sauce did better than blank ones, probably from the symmetry rules. I just assumed it was hardcoded that people do not like naked pizza.
Interesting note for the translation: The game is German and they went deeply into the whimsy, e.g. most of the demographic groups had funny and very colloquial names. It seems they translated "Grufties" with "Goths". Which makes sense considering the real meaning of Grufti in German (members of the Goth subculture), but in the game the term was actually used as funny way to refer to old senior people (people almost in a "Gruft" = "crypt"). So it's obviously a mistranslation, pulling the word straight from the dictionary. Maybe "Cryptid" would have been more fitting. :D
This kind of projects (OpenRCT2, OpenLoco, Open...) are absolutely awesome!
But all of them need one step, free assets under Creative Commons or similar licenses).
I remember the big change of OpenTTD when it became finally all free software.
I wish to know Blender3D to help this projects, but I am a regular IT guy.
This is how an AI-assisted article should be: they used AI to decompile, find things out (with some very interesting techniques listed at the top of the article) but the article itself is human-written. It shows they used AI to help themselves understand, not used AI to do everything.
How do you know it's human-written?
Not OP, but I have to agree with them. The text just makes too much sense. There's no irrelevant shit tossed in for no reason, and I'm not really seeing any annoying LLM-isms.
Of course, I might be wrong.
> I picked it out of a lineup of discounted games in a mall and it hasn't left my psyche ever since.
This is how I found most of my favorite PC games as well, including this one.
Often there were these vertical mesh cylinders with a very low effort sign stuck in them that just read the price and that was it. You had to dig through layers upon layers of arbitrary games and surprisingly often found real gems.
It was an eye-opener for tween me to realize that some of the best games made in that era were about as popular as some of the worst games from the same era.
Thank you for the article, a really fascinating read! Good start to my morning.
These are literally the first and last sentences of the post and may change the perspective for European readers:
>Fast Food Tycoon 2. There's a very good chance that you have not heard of this oddball 2001 business simulator
nope, never hear of
>I actually call this game Pizza Connection 2 because that's the European name!
ah yes, I played that at a friends house!
This is so fascinating. These kind of isometric games were really defining in my childhood so it's amazing to be able to peek behind the curtain in terms of how it all works to render. So interesting about the lighting and how they had pre-rendered .spr files for windows alongside the regular lighting. So cool!
The move to 3d sim games was such a mistake for the industry. Pixelart was way better at the time. It took like 15 year to make it look good again and that with cartoony cell shading anyway.
This stereotype got me laughing
> Goths stay home until 09:00.