So for those who are interested, below I have described some of the game's aspects more in detail, basically going through the first missions in 'Campaign' game mode, how to start off, what kind of challenges may occur and how to overcome those.
Also I tried to write the longest ever TDC devlog post. Someone can confirm if I succeeded or not. I thought I could compensate my infrequent updates by putting everything into the same big package, haha.
So as you remember from my earlier devlogs over a year ago, the game is a fun and easy-to-pick-up business simulation game in the hotel world. Build a hotel of your dreams; construct the building, add floors and rooms, decorate yard, hire and manage staff, build pools, establish services, adjust pricing and improve customer satisfaction, revenue and profits!
Complete 25 missions in the Campaign mode and upgrade your hotelier ranking from novice all the way to a true hotel baron! Tackle eight versatile special challenges in the Scenario mode, or experience the god-like unconstrained creation possibilities of the Sandbox mode. Submit your rankings and scores to a global Hotel Baron Hall of Fame, and send your hotel to the Hotel Gallery for others to experience. Hotel Baron is a versatile game that provides fun for endless of hours (marketing pitch..).
After clicking "PLAY" on the main menu, you will get to choose between three game modes. Select 'Campaign' to start your 25 missions long journey from a total novice to a true hotel baron.
Next screen is a map which allows you to choose a location for your hotel. Location is of great importance as different type of areas face different volumes of tourism, have varying purchasing power levels, employment costs, crime, and so on. You can browse these different area characteristics by selecting one from the drop-down list above the map or by clicking the arrows on the side of the map.
In theory, you would like to aim for a low property value area (which you would get cheaply!) with high traffic volume and purchasing power, yet low employment cost, low crime and non-existent seismic activity (for lowering the probability for natural disasters). In practice, it will be difficult to find an optimal area, so you will need to compromise your decision.
Once you've selected a suitable area, you will get an area summary summarizing the characteristics and the key advantages as well as drawbacks of that particular property.
Now everything is ready for the start of a flourishing and highly profitable hotel business! First, you're asked to name your hotel and set the initial price. Select the name carefully - that's the cornerstone of your hotel brand! Pricing is something you are able to adjust at any given point later on, the default is $35 per one night.
So here we go; the first mission briefing! It says "build a 3-storey hotel building". When you first start the Campaign mode, there isn't anything but the construction of two floors. You will need to build at least one extra floor on the top of the existing two, and finalize the construction.
Add floors by clicking the blue arrow on the top of the hotel - or alternatively, hold the left mouse button and drag your mouse upwards above the hotel building - but be aware of the building costs. Each added floor costs you money and you will not want to spend too much at this early phase. Here in the tutorial we have built three extra floors on the top of the existing ones, which makes our hotel building consisting of five floors. On the right side of the screen, you have a "building" sheet, which in fact is a store where you can buy (with your game money, not your own ) all sorts of stuff to your hotel. Here the building needs the material used for the facade of the hotel - it's the most visible part of your offering when customers enter your hotel. Materials are also costly, so choose wisely. At first, you can select cheaper wood or slightly higher quality regular clay brick.
Once that is done, the building gets its red brick look, and the game announces the first mission being completed. Yay, well done!
After each completed mission, you will unlock some new objects, services or capabilites. The first accomplished mission grants you an ability to hire employees to your hotel - another requisite for successul business!
So how do you hire some staff? That can be done from the game's Store, the same place where you just previously selected the building material. Open the Store by hovering your mouse over the "open store" banner on the right side of the screen. Select "staff" and, let's say, "cleaning" to start from.
The game searches available candidates for cleaning services and you are able to browse through them and review their age, skill level and motivation towards the job, as well as the salary requests. Here we have Barton Willis who's applying for the job! Barton seems to be 65 years old, has a lot of energy and can't just chill on the couch on his retirement days so he wants to be part of your start-up company! Look at his motivation level, it's sky high! Skill-wise, he doesn't know the latest tricks, but is a solid performer. Would you hire Barton - it's up to you, but to me at least this candidate looks rather promising. Salary levels can vary a lot depending on general employment costs of the area and individual requirements, but $2,400 doesn't sound too unreasonable from business management perspective in the beginning when you need to keep tight expenditure discipline.
At the same time when interviewing Barton, your first guests have already arrived, a family of four! But oh no, what happens at the door, all those wallets err people turned away! The game informs about this with a "business tip" which you will get along the way and those tips can prove very useful in many occasions. In this case, it seems that your reception is empty and there's no way these people can even check in your hotel!
So it's back to the Store >> Staff and this time customer service area. I'm sure you can find some skillful and motivated person to hire as your first customer service expert, and your 2nd employee in total after Barton of cleaning services.
After the lack of customer service is fixed, your guests can enter the hotel and you will finally get some $$$ for your hard work and monetary investment! The child is quite unhappy, though, maybe he's hungry and tired after a long trip from the airport...
Remember when you set your initial price at $35? You can change this from the top left corner of the screen, under "key statistics" - or in case you have closed this window, you may reopen it by hovering your mouse first to the bottom-right corner which opens a banner menu of options and clicking the first icon there.
Changing the price can significantly affect the demand, especially when you're offering is quite limited as it is in this stage. In fact, what you have is just empty rooms without any furniture, empty yard without even any plants or trees, a building that looks like a factory from the 50's with not even a snack kiosk in it, and a pensioner with sunglasses weeping the floors. Would you pay $35 for 20 hours of this? Me neither! So basically you have two options to accelerate the demand towards your hotel business: 1) enhance quality of your offering, or 2) cut the prices.
In the long-term, you should keep enhancing your hotel's quality and services, which will enable higher pricing and profitability. But in the short-term, it's much faster to change pricing to find a balance and grow the number of guests. Here we have set the price at $15 from $35, which immediately raises the customer volumes looking at that line of people coming out of the bus!
Speaking of quality, you can monitor your hotel's star rating (0-5 stars), and the components where it's derived from, on the "Quality rating" sheet. If you have reached the mission 4, which requires you to acquire your first star, this sheet opens automatically, but you can open it also from the bottom menu.
Here you can see that you have only "empty stars", i.e. your hotel rating is zero. Ouch. Below you can see why; for instance, it says that your "exterior quality" is 0%. You should avoid situation where any of the four quality components (building, interior, exterior and staff) gets this down. So let's see what we can do to spice up your yard...
From Store >> Exterior you can select some objects, like these simple sunflowers, to make it more lively and cozy. When decorating the yard, there is three object sizes to buy; small ones like flowers, plants, trees, medium-sized such as fountains, hot tubs, kiosks, or large pools etc. The object areas, which are buildable, are highlighted in green rectangles on the yard. Once you've bought an object, you are able to move it around or delete it afterwards.
Oops! What's happening now? The game is showing a warning message on "awful maintenance service". It seems that we have forgotten to hire some maintenance staff and now the guests are having some problems with this. There's a sentence in red saying that these "problems have resulted in Bad Reputation"...
Bad Rep is something you really want to avoid. During Bad Rep your hotel will face much lower demand than what is the natural, everyday demand. On the Quality sheet, you will see the remaining Bad Rep time in days. Also your hotel's fascade is marked with this ugly Bad Rep sign, eww... not a pretty sight
Once you've cleared the Bad Rep and fixed the bottlenecks in your services, you may more freely proceed with the missions and development of your hotel business. Remember to check out all the new objects that you unlock once finishing the missions, like in this case you will get access to important exterior objects, such as a styled bush and fountain.
Using these and other objects, we've been able to really boost our yard quality. Look at this; 80% rating on exterior and 2 stars already for the hotel as a whole! While that's not exactly a Marriott level of quality yet, it's a good start nevertheless. The fact that none of the four areas is at zero quality, and exterior being excellent, makes it possible. This is increased the number of visitors as well; a lof of people checking in all the time!
The building quality having the lowest quality rating, we just upgraded our hotel from clay brick to stone brick, which gives it a slightly better look. That said, it's still quite far from a gorgeous glass or golden hotels, but maybe we'll get there eventually... But now something unfortunate is happening; the new guests are not checking in, but turning away and frowning! We have customer service people in place, so this cannot be the same issue we had earlier. By clicking any of the customers you will get more information, like the name, age and wealth of the customer, but also his or her thoughts! For example, Archie Gonzalez is saying that there is an awfully long queue at the reception. As our customer service quality is on a decent level (over 50%), this must be due to the fact that our hotel is simply full! We are running out of capacity at this demand level that we are facing.
When capacity is a bottleneck, you can think of three basic approaches to solve the issue: 1) increase pricing, which lowers demand in volume yet retaining or even increasing income and profit level due to higher average revenue per customer (easier said that done!), 2) simply add floors to your hotel, or 3) add capacity per existing floor.
In our case here, we lowered the price a while a go to $15, but since then, we've done multiple improvements to the hotel, including significant exterior improvements and a renewed hotel building. It might be justified to raise the price back to $35 per night or thereabouts for this 2-star hotel of ours. This would reduce the number of customers per day, balancing check-in/check-out ratio so that rooms are cleared in time for new guests, but a 133% higher price per night would probably still produce solid revenue despite lowered demand. Given that price elasticity of demand works out as you want it to, and that your customers are ready to pay $35 for a hotel of this quality. You can never be sure, before you test it in practice!
The second option in solving capacity bottleneck is by building new floors. It's quite simple, but also costs more and more money the higher you go. It's also possible to optimize the use of space in the existing floors, which is the third approach. You may increase floor capacity from Store >> Building. As always, a some kind of combination of all these three approaches, is likely to lead to the most efficient solution.
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) all sorts of stuff to your hotel. Here the building needs the material used for the facade of the hotel - it's the most visible part of your offering when customers enter your hotel. Materials are also costly, so choose wisely. At first, you can select cheaper wood or slightly higher quality regular clay brick.
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