Game: Food Truck Empire
Developer: Lichthund
Publisher: Fireshine Games
Genre: Economic Strategy · Management · Automation
Release: Later this year
Platform: PC (Steam)
Demo: Extended demo out now
Playtest: September — sign-ups open
🚚 Food Truck Empire has an extended demo on Steam right now, with a new playtest coming in September and a full launch later this year. Build one hamburger truck into a fleet spanning multiple cities — and automate the kitchen while you’re at it.
🍔 Two Chances to Play Before Launch1. The extended demo is live on Steam today. Start customising your fleet and crafting recipes immediately.
2. A new playtest arrives in September, with sign-ups open now and Lichthund promising “even more tasty secret ingredients.”
Two separate opportunities to try it before release is generous, and the demo being extended rather than a slice suggests real confidence in the loop.
One truck. Basic hamburgers. Eventually, a fleet across several cities.
Food Truck Empire is an economic strategy and management game about building a street food business from nothing. You begin with a single truck serving unremarkable burgers and work toward a fleet operating across multiple cities — earning the five-star reviews that make it possible along the way.
It’s from Lichthund, the studio behind Lichtspeer and ROCKBEASTS, published by Fireshine Games. And the thing that separates it from the crowded cooking-sim field is what’s happening inside the truck.
You’re Not Cooking — You’re Designing a Production Line
⚙️ Factory Sim, Compressed Into a Van
This is the detail that makes Food Truck Empire interesting. You don’t just decorate the truck — you design the entire cooking process inside it, and fully automate the workflow to be fast, efficient and, ideally, still producing food people want to eat.
Most cooking games test the player’s dexterity — chop faster, plate quicker, don’t burn it. Food Truck Empire asks you to build a system that cooks without you, then judges the system rather than your reflexes.
That’s factory-sim logic scaled down to a vehicle, and the constraint is what makes it appealing. Automation games usually give you a sprawling landscape; here you’re optimising a production line inside something you could park on a high street. Space is the puzzle.
It scales too. Unlocking new ingredients and appliances opens up new recipes and preparation methods, which in turn broadens the customer base you can serve — so every addition is both a capability and a fresh layout problem.
Choosing Your Customers Is the Strategy
🏙️ The Downtown Lunch Rush
A wealthy crowd with money to spend — and correspondingly stiff competition from everyone else who noticed.
🏭 Industrial Workers
Hungry, reliable, and after something rather different from the office crowd.
🌃 Late-Night Party Goers
A completely separate set of tastes, operating on a completely different clock.
🎉 City-Wide Events
Huge payouts if you can adapt in time. If you can’t, your competition certainly will.
This is the part that elevates it above pure throughput optimisation. Each territory has its own culinary preferences to learn and cater to, which means you’re not simply making the fastest kitchen — you’re picking a market and building a menu for it.
The downtown trade-off is the clearest example: the money is better, but so is everyone else’s. That’s a genuine positioning decision rather than a difficulty slider, and it gives expansion a shape beyond “unlock the next city.”
🎨 Including Your Own Drawings
Truck customisation covers colours and stickers as you’d expect — but Lichthund also let you put your own drawings on the side. In a genre where personalisation usually means picking from a palette, letting players import their own art is a small feature with a large effect on how attached people get to their fleet.
🎪 Playable at Gamescom — Indie Arena Booth
Food Truck Empire is on the Gamescom show floor, in the Indie Arena Booth.
📍 Hall 10.2
🎯 Booth F010g – E019
🕹️ Playable build
The Indie Arena Booth is consistently one of the better uses of an hour at Gamescom, and a management sim with a demo already public is exactly the sort of thing that plays well on a show floor — short sessions, immediate feedback, no lore to catch up on.
📊 Economic Strategy
🏢 Management
⚙️ Automation
🍔 Cooking
🎨 Customisation
🎯 Single-Player
Who’s Making It
🐕 Lichthund
Founded in 2015 as a two-person effort and now a team of industry veterans, Lichthund describe their focus as unorthodox game ideas — with tight design, fresh art direction and a willingness to try new things as stated values. Their previous work includes Lichtspeer and ROCKBEASTS.
Going from Lichtspeer — a stylised, absurdist action game about throwing spears — to an economic management sim about burger logistics is a considerable swerve, and does rather back up the “unorthodox ideas” claim.
🔥 Fireshine Games
A London-based global publisher, part of the EG7 group, with a catalogue including Core Keeper, Far Far West, Denshattack!, Voyagers of Nera and Popucom — plus physical releases for Atomfall, Balatro and Jurassic World Evolution 3.
Hi there! I’m Marie, also known as CtrlQueen. I’m passionate about keeping up with the latest in gaming news and sharing my insights. RPGs steal my heart with their rich narratives and immersive worlds, but I also love unwinding with fun, casual games. Whether you’re here for deep dives into game mechanics or just to chat about your favorite casual game, you’ve found the right place! Let’s game and explore together.
