Announcing Pizza Legacy v0.1.0 — Pizza Legacy Blog

What's new

In the first release of Pizza Legacy in March, the main economic loop was present: you could open restaurants, design pizzas and compete with your competitors for economic success. What was missing is all the random things thrown at you during a normal working day. In this new release, there are still a few missing features but a lot of functionality has been added and the game is fully playable.

Random events

Staff calling in to
tell you they brought a can of gasoline into the kitchen, and it
must have spilled somehow, and... the oven blew up.

Staff members can be late, call in sick or get three months maternity leave, or they can help themselves to some cash from the register. They mess up in the kitchen and melt all your cheese or blow up an oven. When they call you with one of these events you have a set of responses available to you and each will have a different effect on how the staff member feels afterward.

You can also hire a manager to take care of the day-to-day events, plus they can shop for ingredients when your restaurant is running low, or change menu prices when they feel your restaurant is not doing as well as it should.

The mayor and the police

The mayor is fully wired up: your restaurants get the occasional chance to increase (or decrease) the number of stars it has. There are various awards: trade, restaurant beauty, or Pizza of the Year awards are yours if you can beat your competitors (or grease the wheels with a well-spent donation).

You can call the police and depending on your social status, they might even talk to you. They almost always appreciate a donation as well, which might help if they ever come across you in the wild.

Mafia

The mafia has missions for you; depending on your underworld status there are different types of missions, all with a cash reward. Of course they also come with a risk of being arrested. And you better finish the mission, or you might end up sleeping with the fishes.

Bank & insurance

The bank supports investments and money transfers: you can transfer money between players and other entities like the mayor or to aid money laundering for the mafia.

Insurance companies can be called to take out insurance policies, and within a week of certain events (like your central depot being broken into) you can try to file a claim to get compensated. I hope you paid attention to the small print!

Sabotage

The joke articles (smelly cheese, laxatives, rats and stink bombs) can now be used against other players. Other human players can use them against you as well. My current understanding is that AI players never use this attack in the original; this is still pending further investigation and consideration.

Pizza competitions

At the end of every month there is now a pizza competition: are you better in following the instructions than your competitors? You can also try to challenge any competitor. At the end of the year it's time for the Pizza of the Year competition where you try to wow the jury with your creative skills.

Do you want to
challenge me to a pizza competition?

All game info screens now implemented

Six new information panels have been added: daily profit graph, cash flow and liquidity view, per-restaurant sales curve, restaurant sales figures, customer tastes panel, and a property overview. All the information screens are now implemented.

You can now edit the prices of pizzas already on your menu.

Scores & fullscreen status updates

You get points for various things that you do, and you get the fullscreen status updates.

A man
wearing a shower cap and pink arm floaties is swimming in golden coins
with a big smile on his face, with text underneath
"Congratulations! You have just become a millionaire!"

As part of the fullscreen message status system you can also win or lose. When you run out of money and are unable to pay your suppliers: bad luck, your game is over. Do you achieve the win condition? Congratulations, you are the true Pizza Tycoon! I have more to say about the win condition and how it works in the original, so a dedicated blog post on that is coming in early June.

Supplier contracts

You can sign contracts with your suppliers to have supplies delivered to you every day.

Autosave

The game automatically saves every day, and keeps the last three autosaves. You can disable this in the options.

Polish and internals

Operations that should take time now do: placing furniture, making phone calls, and other actions consume in-game minutes just as they do in the original. Mouse wheel support has been expanded significantly: you can now zoom the city map, flip through staff candidate cards, adjust order counts in the ingredient and furniture screens, switch furniture categories in the restaurant view, and change values in number input popups. Status messages behave more faithfully. Sorting of food suppliers has been changed to match the original and some suppliers that were cut from Pizza Tycoon but still present in the data files are no longer being shown.

We introduce the job market; not all characters are available for hire at all time, depending on your difficulty a given amount of staff is available. We also get an extra 100 characters by implementing the "double" system from the original that has 100 extra names it can use for existing character pictures, with a clever algorithm to vary the stats of these extra characters compared to the original they're based on.

When configuring the path to PT.EXE, you can now point at your Steam, or Pizza Connection.app folder and Pizza Legacy will find the right directory itself.

This new release adds a nice quality of life improvement over Pizza Tycoon: You can now scroll the city and restaurant map with the right mouse button. Both grab-and-drag-the map and grab-and-drag-the-camera (inverse) are supported.

The save game format has changed (and is now compressed to save disk space) and is not compatible with v0.0.1 saves.

Where things stand

The game is playable. The main things you'll notice missing are the walking animations in the restaurants (which includes attacking your competitor restaurants), newspaper advertising, staff training and mission mode (does anyone use that?).

Try it yourself

You can download Pizza Legacy v0.1.0 for Windows, Linux, and macOS from the downloads section on the main page. You'll need a copy of the original Pizza Tycoon / Pizza Connection (available on GOG and Steam), often for under a euro.

The source code for Pizza Legacy can be found in our repo on Codeberg.