Giving the rise to the name “Dirty Thirties”, the Dust Bowl was a region of the Southern Plains of the USA that suffered severe droughts and dust storms for nearly the entire decade at the end of the last millennium. While rains have returned to the region and nature managed to mend, a catastrophe of such magnitude mustn't just be forgotten.



Which is why each and every glance at your station’s name will serve as a reminder never to underestimate the dryness nature is capable of. One man can’t fight against the storm - not unprepared, at least. Dust storms have pelletized the area and the sand mounds that build up require prompt removal. Just expect nature to throw a curveball your way once in a while.



An excavator is going to be a big help in this endeavor.
The excavator is a heavy piece of machinery and goes through large amounts of fuel in no time. Not to mention the excavator is hardly automated - you’re going to be sitting in the driver’s seat after all. Without skill and a good eye, you will find your time spent behind the steering wheel much longer than you’d expect, and in turn you’ll see all that precious fuel as nothing but fumes released into the air behind you.


The excavator weighs a ton, and you know what happens when a mountain on wheels hits anything in its path. Be very, very careful maneuvering so as to not demolish your customers’ vehicles, not to mention the customers themselves. You’ll also need a lot of space to stash the machinery when not in use, so park responsibly. And above all else, please, do NOT leave the excavator in the middle of the road. The local sheriff still laments having to drive all the way here to tow the previous one away to this day.

So you’ve got yourself a Gas Station at a killing price - practically for pennies, as some say. Was it great value? Arguably, yes. Will you have to work your hands off getting things in order? More than certainly. Welcome to your station’s lot. There’s dirt in astonishing quantities, more rubble than you can shake a stick at and so many leftovers from the old station you’ll be wondering what half of the things you find even do. Time to pull up your sleeves and get to work.



The first chapter of the game, before proper Station management even kicks in, will feature you cleaning up your newly-purchased lot to make it at least somewhat presentable. There’s a lot of rubble to go around. You will have to clean not only the inside, but the outside as well. And sometimes, perseverance just won’t cut it. In other words, grab your broom and your shovel and go have some fun.

Rubble isn’t just a pile of bricks stacked on top of another to be clearly removed with a simple interaction. Break apart a mound and lo’ and behold, it’s all coming tumbling down. Dirt happens to make more dirt before you’re finally done with it, so prepare for a longer time out shoveling. Of course, trying to get everything rolling away from you is fun in and of itself. When you gather things up to sort them into bins, why not try your throwing arm instead?



If you ever start feeling like you’re an archeologist working at a digsite, that’s very much the intention. All that mess holds treasure. Well, it’s still junk, but one’s man’s treasure is another man’s junk. Or vice versa, rather. You may find things that are genuinely useful.

Even if Gas Station Simulator begins slowly, you’ll already have your hands full with things to do - literally so. Don’t rush things, do what you feel is appropriate and always give everything you find its due scrutiny. Treasures await in the junk.

You’re not the first to the turf. That much can be easily guessed by the fact there was a Gas Station (ruins thereof, to be specific) available for purchase. But we’re not talking about your predecessors. These have come and gone. This person has been here and is here to stay. And he’s younger than you.

Out there, not too far from your Gas Station stands a lonely fort cobbled together out of metal sheets, wire, duct tape and a healthy serving of goodwill. Within that fort dwells Dennis, a child that nobody quite knows how he got there. Nobody quite knows where Dennis should be. Asking about the child yields a simple “he’s always been here” or “I don’t know”. Asking Dennis himself usually yields a balloon of paint to the face. Relying on your eyes might provide a few clues as to whom Dennis is related, but you’ll have to really train your eyes to eagle’s precision. The kid is anything but slow.

So getting a Gas Station came packaged in with an imp. What does Dennis do? He hates you. Well, not really. He pretends, but you’re strangers to each other. More accurately, he finds you stepping over turf that, in his logic, belongs to him and him alone. And that means war. Of course, Dennis is a child and you needn’t worry about having your fuel stations blown up overnight. However, you might want to get a mop and a broom. And plenty of other things, too.



Dennis’ modus operandi is simple. He can’t break things, so he’ll do his best to despoil them. Aggravating him might have you wake up to… a good number of small, but harmless things. Well, harmful to your time. Because someone has to clean this all up.

What will upset the kid? A variety of factors, but picking up on his tendencies will help you account for the inevitability of your walls becoming an art exhibit unto themselves. Since the land is considered his turf, you can be sure Dennis will come calling whenever you invest in a significant upgrade to your gas station. The kid also doesn’t like people coming in large numbers, so the better you’re doing the higher the chance you’ll find Dennis’ handiwork somewhere on your station. Where will he strike? Simply put - no place is safe.

One day, maybe, Dennis and you will bury the axe and put your differences (his differences) behind the two of you. For now, consider the kid your little nemesis. Good luck keeping things together, you’ll need it!

Watch Mercus, one of the programmers on the project play the game's demo and comment on existing features and things to come in Gas Station Simulator.

Gas Station Simulator is all about running a gas station. An abandoned gas station you buy, renovate, build up and with time expand. All that while running it and serving customers to earn money for expanding it even further and adding new services.

In this demo we set you up with a gas station that is mostly renovated and already somewhat equipped that you have run for a day or two. Fill up cars, sell goods in your tiny gas station store, do some smaller car repairs, whatever it takes to keep customers satisfied. That means keeping the place clean, too.

With the limited scope of a demo we wanted to give you a good idea of how running a gas station in our game feels and let you experience some of the base mechanics you will see in the full game. While it’s just a tiny portion of things you’ll be able to do in Gas Station Simulator, we feel it provides a very nice experience and outlook onto the final product.
Give it a try and let us know how you liked it, we’d love to read your feedback.

And here some fresh in-game footage out of the demo:

It’s finally here, the demo for Gas Station Simulator!

To give you a better idea of the gameplay elements you will see in the game, we decided to not demo the start of the game, but use a gas station that has been already renovated and equipped a bit instead.

A cousin of yours is working on a gas station and needs to take off for a day of two, asking you to step in and take over for a bit. This way you get to experience some of the actual gameplay and see how you like it.

We also added a link to a survey at the end of the demo. If you have a couple of minutes, please help us improve the game by providing some feedback. The tried to keep the survey short and easy to navigate.

And no go and enjoy the demo!

The day's over. The bright, warm orange sun is slowly descending to hide itself behind the horizon. You see a ray of light sneak itself into the room as you check out the last customer for the time being, and throw your gaze out the window to watch the spectacle. And a spectacle it is, for sure.



When out in the desert, sky-watching happens to be one of the few things that give someone some relief and Gas Station Simulator aims not to disappoint. Using a dynamic, physics-based system to generate and control the sky, we can safely say that the lightwork in the game is as realistic as it can be, perhaps even more real than reality itself.
The sun creeps from east to west, replaced by the moon during night time. Each celestial body, including the major stars in the night sky, casts its light that falls towards the desert floor.
Clouds, dynamic and layered, cast shadows underneath the terrain they roll over, with darkness intensifying that much more for but a few seconds. Day turns to night, night turns to day, and the clouds roll along with the passage of time. If not for the plethora of customers, it's easy to find yourself mesmerized by the beauty of Gas Station Simulator's sky.



Wait, customers?
Were you anywhere else in the world, closing the establishment come nightfall seems a reasonable thing to do. But you're in a mid-western desert, and the rules work a little bit different here. For starters, 'closing hours' are a myth. As day turns to night, customers... don't stop coming. Maybe the traffic lessens, but there's many travelers out there playing it sensible and saving the long rides for night time, where the desert heat isn't liable to cook them alive in the confines of their vehicles. Tired, night riders will buy energy drinks or something to snack on, a different priority assortment than a tourist bus full of nuns.



But cherish your quiet moments. There's much going on in Gas Station Simulator, day-in and night-out. If you can spare but a while, sit down, enjoy the soft banjo tune and marvel at Hellen's slow and warm descent. That's what Joe suggests, at least.

When starting the development of a new game, you usually start with prioritizing the first features to prototype. Back when we began working on Gas Station Simulator, we did that as well, but ended up starting with a rather unexpected choice.
You’d think renovation, building upgrades, the plethora of customer interactions or the tasks at hand like filling up tanks or checking vehicles would be the choices to start with. And you would be right, except many of them rely on something very basic: how the customers arrive and how they get to where they want before you get to the tasks or interactions.

This means we had to tackle the vehicle AI first to see if we can get it as detailed as we wanted it to be, because how many other features would play out is going to rely on what the vehicle AI will be able to handle. The thing about vehicles and their behavior is, that like characters, you spot any imperfection and odd behavior immediately, because we are all so used to seeing vehicles in every situation every single day.



We didn’t just want a customer to arrive at the gas station by moving their vehicle from A to B. We wanted them to do it naturally, meaning decrease speed when turning, slowing down when it gets more crowded or narrow, navigate obstacles like other customers parking badly etc. We also needed the AI to handle all the changing conditions that arise from the upgrades you will make to your gas station, like adding parking spaces and new parking lots.

Then there is the matter of a complex decision tree. The customer wants to fill his tank and get a snack, so he wants to get to a gas pump closest to the entrance and thus shop area. Or a customer who wants to fill up his tank arrives, but all the gas pumps are currently occupied. Not to mention the many events that will occasionally activate like a tour bus arriving and thus presenting a whole new challenge for you to manage and the AI to handle.

As we are now in the process of completing the last phase of the vehicle AI we are more than happy with what we achieved. It is more akin to something you’d expect from a city simulation game with traffic decisions, dynamic obstacle handling, lane changes, traffic lights support and shortcut handling. While a gas station seems nothing like a city, from a game logic and the AI’s point of view it actually is exactly like a city, just a lot smaller. The requirements in terms of fictionality however are the same.

When running a gas station “in the middle of nowhere” things are not always black and white. There are many shades of gray in between and you are unlikely to avoid them while playing the game.

It is thus advised to look into security when hiring people to help you run your gas station. Reliable employees that are also security conscious can be a big advantage when you become a target of fraudulent customers or really shady characters.

Gas Station Simulator has multiple pools of somewhat random events triggered by a series of influencing factors such as revenue, expansion level, customer traffic or time of day.
These event are things like customers trying to steal something from the shelfs in the shop area, people trying to drive off without paying for fuel or some shady characters deciding it’s a good idea to attempt a robbery.
Not to mention really shady characters telling you what pity it would be if something would happen to your large glass windows or educating you on the dangers of dealing with fuel…

Negative events isn’t where it ends. There are also pools of potentially positive events with deals clearly on the shady side. Let’s look at one example that’s representative of various similar events on the supply side of running your gas station. In order to sell fuel to your customers, you obviously have to buy large quantities of fuels and store them in underground depots of your gas station.

You usually buy from known providers and representatives of large fuel delivery companies. But every now and then you might be approached by some shady character offering you a fuel delivery at a significantly lower price, sometimes even half of what you’d normally had to pay.

Certainly a tempting proposition, no question about it. But it comes with some risks. You might not get your delivery or not get it on time. Or the quality might be lower. It can happen, but it doesn’t need to. Actually, you can risk it a few times and discover that some shady characters are more reliable than others. Once you figure out which ones, you can consider seriously cutting your costs making these kind of deals part of your supply chain.

Gas Station Simulator comes with a large array of customization options for your gas station to allow you to truly personalize it. It all starts with giving it a name. That name carries over to all sorts of things beyond the gas station’s name shield such as advertisement. It also changes style according to how you modernize your gas station and what overall looks you choose.

The most important thing when it comes to customizing the looks of your gas station however is the color scheme. It’s applied to most elements, various furniture items and even appliances you put up and obviously all expansions and buildings. It also carries over to all styles you can choose for your gas station when you modernize it.

Those are the large ticket items, but the customization doesn’t stop there. There is a ton of smaller things you can use to add a more personal touch to your business such as posters, painting, lighting or the type of shelfs or stands you use. You can also pick between different styles for the overall interior decoration, not to mention the different choices for the outside areas around your gas station.
There is a lot to customize. You don’t have to, you can go with a preset template, but if your feel like it, know there is plenty to choose from. Doing so will give you slight bonuses over choosing the template approach and will also boost any advertising you do.