A Small Personal Project

Lugano Bay Tycoon is my first video game released on Steam.

The project started as a simple personal challenge: to begin from scratch and actually create, finish, and publish a game of my own.

It is not meant to be a huge simulator with hundreds of hours of content, but rather a small management experience set by the lake, where you can grow your own pedal boat and small boat rental business.

The game will continue to be improved and expanded over time, also based on feedback from the community.

If you are looking for a small indie management experience and would like to follow the evolution of a project that started almost from zero, welcome to Lugano Bay.

One bay, some boats, and a season to balance

The Lugano lakefront wakes up, the first visitors walk down to the water, and

someone is looking at your pedal boats. From here it is up to you: how many boats

to keep moored, what to charge, where to build the next pier, whether to open a

kiosk where people actually walk.

What you do

• Six kinds of boat — pedal boats, rowing boats, dinghies, runabouts,
  electric boats and water taxis. They cost, earn and wear differently: a fleet of
  nothing but runabouts is not a better fleet, just a more expensive one.

• Build along the promenade — piers for more moorings, kiosks to take
  money from people with no intention of getting into a boat.

• Pricing is a decision — raise it and the till fills while the queue
  empties. Every visitor has a budget and a limit to their patience.

• Seasons and weather — summer brings crowds, winter takes them away, and
  a thunderstorm calls every boat back to shore at the worst possible moment.

• Contracts — a hotel, a school trip, the sailing club. You sign, you get
  a deadline, and from that moment the day has a shape.

• Reputation — earned by keeping renters happy, and it opens up boats and
  buildings you cannot afford at the start.

What kind of game this is

A calm one. You do not steer the boats, there is nobody to beat, there is no

losing. There is a bay that lives, books to balance, and a speed you set

yourself — including pausing it and just watching the lake.

Single player. English and Italian. Autosave.

The real lake

The bay is Lugano's, recognisable but not to scale: the shore, the promenade, the

mountains behind. The red pedal boats with the little-car bodywork are the ones

that are actually out there on the Ceresio.