Groceries Please!

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Groceries Please!

by natpat

Cart #groceries_please-1 | 2022-10-20 | Code ▽ | Embed ▽ | License: CC4-BY-NC-SA

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Balancing work and family is hard, especially when you own a corner shop. It feels like you get a new customer every 10 seconds! Plus, my young daughter doesn’t help. I love her, but she needs a lot of help. Then there’s my family back in India… how much can I afford to support them?

There’s always so much to do every day: stocking, serving customers, cleaning up mess, helping my daughter with homework… I try and keep customers happy, but there’s only so much you can do. I just have to try my best.

Made for LD51! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/51/groceries-please

A hint: you need to be in front of the shelves to stock them.

fun little game

Wow ! What a great game. Nice bit of social commentary mixed in with what is a simple little game. I assume the title is a nod to "Papers, please". Its great when simple ideas have emotional depth. Absolute Gold star work.

Wow. I'm really impressed by this game. The gameplay is simple, but provides just enough challenge and ramping to be engaging. The choices between stages are heart-breaking. Really great. "Ta!"

Thank you both so much! 😁

This was a nice short experience. I wonder if there are bonuses if I perform better? I hate it when someone makes a mess and someone comes in at the same time though, guaranteed frown even if I was already cleaning it.

Loved it, but my first few minutes were spent picking up boxes and putting them in front and behind the shelf. Then I read the desc. Great game.

I thoroughly enjoyed it and i loved your storytelling,as the others said,truly heartbreaking.
When the daughter came in i instantly knew what she wanted,such a great idea.
The difficulty ramping is perfect, the customers dropping stuff and then just
leaving it is scary accurate:D

When people come in, say "no ?" what does that mean? I want a no frown run, but they keep ruining them and I don't know why. Also, is it just random if a customer will say "ta" or "thanks" or is that decided by something.

Hi Spuder!

When people say "No X?", they came in looking for one specific group of item (the same as the delivery crates, e.g. they want anything from the candy crate, or the produce crate). If you don't have anything from the group they want, that's when they'll complain. The only way to avoid getting that is by luck (always having what they want) or by having at least one type of item from each crate. There are 7 different item groups - produce, candy, drinks, bread, household, alcohol and food.

The thanks/ta after checkout is random, yes - as long as you serve them before they get upset they have a chance to say thanks.

Good luck with your no frown run! It might be quite tricky 😅 I'm really happy you enjoy the game enough to give it a go though!!

Thanks natpat, I figured that the thanks/ta was random, and how the "no ?" worked, but the confirmation was handy to make sure i was not doing anything wrong. I did notice that there is a large space between the "no" and the "?", like they are supposed to say what I don't have. But they don't say anything other than "no ?"

Oh no! That is a bug 😭 they should give an example of the type of item they were looking for. I don't know why that's broken. Let me fix it 🙂

EDIT: Now fixed! They should properly now complain about what they were looking for. It was caused by sub's behaviour being changed between 0.2.4 and 0.2.5.

@natpat first of all congrats because the game is so good and addicting (I regularly try my luck for a no-frown run but it's tough) I definitely think it needs more appreciation!

BTW a while ago this funny bug happened:

I had just rushed to pick up the box in the middle (in the tile below the circle) and went too far up so while I was in the empty spot circled in red -with a box in hand- that one spawned below my feet and it pushed me out of the window 😆 I guess I've played more than a hundred times but first time this happens.

Anyway not really stuck: dropping the box I carried and picking up the box below me was enough to re-enter the shop (through the wall) and keep going.

Loved it. The story really added to the experience! Really fun

Good game (simulation?). This captures the essence of running a store, so accurately in fact that I stopped playing at the end of the round, wanting to take a short break.

great game! as another commenter said i feel like customers dropping items and other customers immediately coming in is an oversight and I think a good fix would be adding a timer to the dirt (about 5 seconds) to have some time.

Thanks for all the feedback!

@nomcatas - customers dropping items and then another customer coming in straight away was unintentional - but we saw it as we were playtesting and explicitly kept it that way. It's definitely not fair, and it could be argued that it detracts from a gameplay perspective, but I strongly believe it adds to the game thematically. I touch on it a bit in my post-mortem here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/51/groceries-please/groceries-please-post-mortem

extremely accurate retail experience, great job