How Shady Deals became Roadhouse Simulator
Gas Station Simulator: Prologue - Early Days · published
Hey Gas Jockeys!
TLDR: we cancelled the Shady Deals DLC and built Roadhouse Simulator instead. The long version is below, and the Demo is out today.
Check Our Demo of Roadhouse Simulator:
We killed it after a milestone review
In September 2024 we released the Car Junkyard DLC for Gas Station Simulator. It went well, and it also set a new quality bar for us that nobody had planned to set.
Around that date we sat down with what was left of the Shady Deals milestones and had the kind of review where you stop talking about the schedule and start talking about the thing itself. The conclusion took a while for anyone to say out loud, because nobody wants to be the person who says it.
Shady Deals was not going to be as good as the DLC we had just released.
We hired an outside company to help us deliver the biggest and best DLC for Gas Station Simulator, and we realised that goal was no longer reachable.
What Shady Deals was
For anyone who came in late: Shady Deals was announced as the next big Gas Station Simulator DLC, and the pitch was your Uncle turning up with another business proposition, maybe on the not so legal side of business.
You would help him build All The Dots, a pub if we are being generous with the word, right next to your gas station. Around it sat everything a place like that attracts. Moonshine you distilled yourself and sold to your own patrons. Under the counter pharmaceuticals. Brawls. A police force taking a steady interest in your evenings. And because we can never leave anything alone, complicated relations with local biker gangs.
There was a cast too, a set of unsavoury characters with their own stories and their own deals. Octane among them, there to show a newcomer how that side of the business really worked.
We still like that pitch. It is why a lot of you were waiting. Nothing here is us deciding it was a bad idea. The problem was never the idea. It was its proper place in the Gas Station world.
The pub got too big for the plot
A DLC has one job: make the base game bigger without making it worse. Car Junkyard works because the junkyard feeds the gas station. It is a second business that points back at the first one. You leave the counter, you do something with your hands, you come back richer, and the gas station is still the centre of your world.
The pub did not behave like that.
Put a room full of people in a building, people who drink, argue, order food, wait too long, get louder, break the furniture and occasionally each other, and you do not have a feature. You have a second game running in the same save file. It needs opening hours. Customers with their own patience. Staff. A supply chain. An escalation curve, failure states, its own reasons for an evening to go wrong. Even a few of those systems, built properly, wanted more attention than a side building has any right to ask for.
Every time we made the pub better, it took another slice of the evening away from the gas station. Not in a complementary way. The stronger the pub got, the less reason there was to walk back across the lot.
At some point Shady Deals stopped enhancing Gas Station Simulator and started competing with it.
That was not a DLC any more. That was a game that had not admitted what it was yet...
Why the PAST instead of the FUTURE
The decision to make it a full game came first. Setting it in the past as a prequel to Gas Station came a little later, and once someone said it the argument lasted about a minute.
The question had been sitting there for years. Where does a man like that come from? Where do you learn to run a business with flexible accounting, disposable furniture and an ongoing relationship with the police? Nobody arrives at a gas station like that. Something happened first.
So we moved the whole thing backwards. The Uncle as a young man, still on Route 66, a different stretch of it, a few days' drive from the patch of dirt that eventually becomes a Gas Station you might recognise.
And the Roadhouse stops being a side building bolted onto somebody else's business. It is the whole world, which is what it had been demanding to be for about a year.
What we kept
More than you would think, and less than you would think.
All The Dots kept its name. It was always the right name and there was never a conversation about changing it. If you played the Prologue in May, you stood in it.
The Gangs came with us, adjusted for the period and for a world where they are the main event.
Octane came with us. He was the player's mentor in Shady Deals and he is the player's "mentor" here, a role that works considerably better when the player is a young man who genuinely knows nothing yet.
Most mechanics kept their names, though nearly all of them changed shape once they were feeding a full game loop.
Underneath that it is a rebuild. New code. Around ninety percent of the assets in the game today were made or remade from scratch. What survives from Shady Deals is the theme, the names and the design we developed during the Shady Deals phase.
The most valuable thing we carried over was the design conclusions. We spent a long time building a version of this that did not work, and by the end we knew exactly why. That is expensive knowledge, so nothing in Roadhouse Simulator is a first draft.
The Demo is out today
It is free, obviously, and it continues from the Prologue.
What's new
- The bar end to end, the one you already know.
- More beer types, each bringing its own set of trouble to the Bar.
- Working under the watchful eye of the Police.
- The Hype you need to manage to keep your guests entertained.
- If you are good at your job you will gain Influence, and you can spend it expanding beyond the walls of the Roadhouse.
Where we are right now
The DLC is gone. Absorbed. The Steam page is down. Everything it was going to be is either in Roadhouse Simulator already or on its way there.
It is a standalone game and you do not need Gas Station Simulator to play it. It is the Uncle's story from the beginning, built to work as somebody's first game in this world.
The Demo is live. Go and see whether we were right.
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Want more capybaras? Check our upcoming free Airport Contraband - Prologue:
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