Hot Dog City is a business management game in which the players take the role of a hot dog cart manager. It has a very complex economic system presenting to the players a wide array of variables to deal with: customers price expectations, permit prices and populational density for each city area, cart storage space, customers sauce preference, serving efficiency, customers waiting tolerance, ingredients waste and cart popularity at each area. In the end it turned out to be an elegant, easy to play and very addicting game, even with all complexity behind the scenes.

Also, this was the first, and only, project I took part into, which was finished, in terms of functional aspects, by the time of alpha release, having only cosmetic and balancing adjustments left for beta. This was only possible because of the great teamwork and effort by all involved, specially the programmers, Gabriel Santos and Claudia Brito, without who I would never be able to deal with the complex economy and maths of the game at that time.

It doesn’t excel in graphic aspects – which is what people expects from management games anyway – but is a great success in terms of gameplay. In my opinion it was the best management game at its time, easily surpassing its benchmark game Lemonade Tycoon. It’s probably one of the games I am more proud of designing, but you can only understand that by playing it, what is quite hard since it’s available exclusively at Samsung Fun Club’s brazilian site and for a very limited numer of devices.

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