Announcing Pizza Legacy v0.0.1

Origins

Late 2010 I had some time before starting a new job, and I was looking for a project to keep myself busy. I was an avid Transport Tycoon Deluxe player so I was well aware of the efforts happening in that community to keep the game both playable on modern systems, and even extend its functionality. First with the amazing TTDPatch by Josef Drexler, and later with OpenTTD by Ludvig Strigeus (of ScummVM fame). I felt it was an amazing gift to the community to give us an open source version of the game, which would open up so many more possibilities (and the ongoing development on OpenTTD has proven that out I'd say!). Not knowing any assembly I didn't see myself doing that, but there are other options than just disassembling something completely, and there was this other tycoon game that I used to play a lot, that it might be interesting to look into: Pizza Tycoon. And that didn't have the same community of players around it, so no pressure :D

Fast forward 16 years and here we are, a first release. I'll do future posts with the evolution of the project over this time, but first, let's talk about the current state of things.

What's the state of the game?

Working

The core loop is there: you can rent or buy restaurants, hire staff (cooks and waiters only), buy furniture and lay out your restaurant as you see fit. You can try to recreate the original pizzas from the manual, or you can create your own creations. You can add them to the menu and demand for them depends on the demographics of your customers. The demographics of your customers in turn is determined by your restaurant's location in the city. To increase demand you can do advertising (except newspaper articles). To make sure you have enough ingredients to actually sell some pizzas you have to buy stock from one of your suppliers, but for now only one-off purchases. There are no contracts for repeat delivery yet, and although you can buy ingredients in the central depot too, these ingredients will not be sent to your restaurant yet, so that's not going to help you meet your demand.

Missing

The biggest issue is that there are no failure or success conditions yet. There are also no random events yet: no mayor visiting your restaurants to give or take stars away, no mafia offering "protection", no police checking for weapons.

A few things in the terminal will crash the game if you try them: insurance agents and the Mafia cannot be called at all. The bank is missing investment and transfers.

What's next

Up first is the fullscreen status update system; it's there partially but is both buggy and incomplete. This is the system that tells you things like "You're halfway towards becoming a millionaire", etc. This should also give us our first proper failure condition when you run out of money.

After that I'm planning to work on calling the Mafia. This means setting up a system to schedule mafia jobs, and a system for random interruptions by the mafia (which we can later use for police and the mayor as well).

Trying it yourself

You can download Pizza Legacy v0.0.1 for macOS, Linux, and Windows from the downloads section on the main page. You'll need a copy of the original Pizza Tycoon / Pizza Connection — it's available on GOG and Steam, often for under a euro.

Source code lives on Codeberg.