I must admit, the name “Smalltown Grocery” is growing on me. I may leave it as that, as mundane as it sounds. lol
Anyway, I have some sad news to announce. If you’ve been following along, you may have noticed it’s been a while since my last post. In fact, it’s been 15 days. (Half a month! Holy cow!) That’s what entering a game jam does to your productivity and workflow on a personal project. It brings it to a screeching halt. Let that be a warning to you, if you are a fellow aspiring game developer. Game jams are fun, but they have a way of barging in and taking over.
Luckily, The day after I wrote my last entry (January 22nd), I did a little bit of work on Smalltown Grocery. Here, let me make a new gif…
I created shelf items! Yay! I revamped the boring-looking art a little bit, too. I’ll explain the shelves in a minute, but first I’ll tell you what happened.
I went looking around the world wide web for some inspiration. At the end of the last DevLog, I noted that I needed to get to work on developing this game’s design more thoroughly, but I was hitting a block. I couldn’t think. But I knew there were other shopping games out there, so I went looking. I found the typical lemonade-stand-type of game and diner-dash-type of game, and even a kid’s math game, but those aren’t really what I want to make. I suppose the diner-dash-type comes the closest, but it lacks the depth I’m looking to create. (I went looking for links just now, but I can’t seem to find again the things I found two weeks ago.)
But then I found “Supermarket Tycoon Prototype” and struck gold! This was very close to what I was envisioning.
After watching the video, and reading the info and comments, I found the game on steam. It took a bit of doing since I’m not as familiar with Steam as I probably should be, but I was able to find it and actually play it. I have to say, Toby Kellaway (the game’s author) shows brilliance in this game, in my opinion. It was inspiring. Kellaway’s use of color and light-hearted character sprites heavily influenced the change in my art’s direction. I don’t know if I’ll keep the character this way (since I’d like to keep the overhead view constant), but it sure has an appealing look to me. I am definitely going to be using the color coding of shelf categories.
Speaking of shelves…
If you notice in the gif above, I was able to give each shelf 30 items. (The game speed and movement speed was sped up for testing/debugging purposes.) These items are arranged in 10 rows of 3. The shopper chooses a shelf from which to get an item (randomly, at this time), takes one item from a randomly chosen row, then chooses the next shelf he will visit. Each shelf has its own 3D array.
item[row, stat]
row:
row number = (0-9)
stat:
0 = quantity (0-3)
1 = face position (0-2)
So when the shopper takes an item, it subtracts 1 from the quantity in that row, and adds 1 to the face position (product facing). This way, later in development of the game, I can have the employee come along to face the shelves and/or fill it with more items by easily manipulating this code. The drawing of the shelves and items use these arrays to position everything. I surprised myself when I got it all working.
But then the Jam happened. Now I’m stuck trying to finish that game. Read all about it in the next blog post! 🙂
