I've been busy
When this page went up in April I was just one person, building a game store sim with no budget, and that you could come and watch me build it. Since then there have been 823 changes to the game. Almost all of it landed in the playtest, which is free and open to everyone right now. Here's where the game is actually at now:
The store starts empty. You build it.
You don't inherit a furnished shop. You get a lit shell and a catalog, and the floor is yours.
Buy and place every fixture yourself - shelves, glass cases, counters, racks
Placement is free-form: no grid, and pieces snap flush to each other when you push them together
Wall paint, wallpaper, slatwall, carpet and ceiling panels
Posters, hanging signage and ceiling banners you can place, move and remove
It all stays exactly where you left it
The floor matters more than the register
The interesting job is being a shopkeeper, not a cashier.
Customers put things back, and not always where they found them
A browsed shelf stops looking merchandised
A customer who can't find what they came for tells you so
An unmet request brings that named customer back days later, once you've stocked it
A real economy underneath
Every system - demand, era, your pricing, your displays, the customer's own taste - feeds one scoring pass. Customers buy as themselves instead of following a script.
What people ask for and don't get changes what the world wants next
Naive and savvy sellers, appraisal, and variant tells you learn to read
An online collector marketplace where you can watch bids escalate
Sticker pricing with teeth, console licensing, and bills you pay on your own schedule
Physical checkout
Take the notes, put them in the drawer, count out change. A working card reader. Multi-item baskets that ring as one tab.
And recently
A CRT television main menu that tunes in from static
Customers who walk in off the street, on a street that has people and traffic on it
Real box art on every item, and the download is less than half what it was
Repair benches, midnight launches, trade-in grading, a 19-category skill tree
Play it now, free
The Playtest is open to everyone and running the current build. No request, no waiting, no cost. Grab it from this page and you are in.
It is the most useful thing you can do for this game short of making it yourself, because the bugs I need most are the ones that only show up when a lot of people play at once.
Join the Discord for dev updates, feature votes, bug reports and dumb ideas at 2am.
And if you haven't yet: wishlisting costs nothing, and for a solo dev with no marketing budget it is the difference between being seen and being invisible.
More soon.