DirtyBiz: a haulage game checked against old data

2 to 6 September 2026:

There is a second building site next to Anpfiff1, and it is new: DirtyBiz Truck Tycoon Offline, a turn-based haulage game for Android. Building up rather than reflexes, offline, landscape, and explicitly not a casual game.

Why an old template pays off

The starting point is a business simulation from the late nineties whose files sit on the disk in plain text. What makes it attractive is that it can be checked.

Read out of that data: 170 cities, 288 road connections, 210 goods, 22 trucks, 37 pieces of equipment, 57 events and 2,064 scene nodes across 31 scripts. A body of data like that works as a test rig. You can run your own simulation against it and see straight away whether the numbers drift apart.

What is taken over is rules and figures, both free to use. Every image, every sound, every line of text, the title and the entire interface are built new. The simulation core is not in the data, so it is reconstructed. Every assumption carries a provenance mark, and calibration runs against the rig.

A small language, seventy-seven instructions

The template's scenes are not a hard-wired sequence but scripts in a small language of their own. So the project now contains a virtual machine that understands all 77 of its instructions. Shops, road events and dialogue are data rather than program code, and new content needs no new code.

The name was the hardest decision

Decided on 6 September: DirtyBiz Truck Tycoon Offline, one name for every language, with the German store title "DirtyBiz Spedition LKW Manager" and the package name de.dirtybiz.trucktycoon.

Three obvious directions were dropped beforehand, all for the same reason. Two collided with registered trademarks of other games, the third sat too close to a protected work title. A name that only hears from a law firm after launch costs more than a week of thinking.

What already stands

Godot 4.6.3, Android. The screens are generated from a hotspot map instead of hand-placed coordinates: office, contracts, truck store, trailer dealer, card index, construction firm, post, a phone book with eight numbers. On top of that a map of Europe with your own trucks out on the leg and pinch zoom, D-Mark or euro as a setting, seven intro plates, twenty Play achievements, five scenarios, a chronicle and a weekly review.

None of it is checked by feel. A smoke test runs over 120 steps, four gates are green, and the 46 store screenshots come out of a test run rather than being taken by hand.

Money, and the condition attached to it

Free until day 90, then one full version for 5.99 euro. No advertising.

The condition is written in the same document as the decision: from day 90 the game has to get better. A barrier at the point where a tycoon game thins out anyway would be a toll booth rather than a full version. So a second plan hangs off that decision, for quarters two to four.

What is missing

The gates a human has to open: the upload key, a privacy address, a run on a real device. After that, the closed beta.