GrocerQuest: An MMO Business Sim

[Portasaurus]

I have decided that my most recent calling in life is to produce a single-player pseudo-MMO/business sim game combining elements of EQ + Lemonade Stand + Cart Life + Harvest Moon + Cake Mania + Goat MMO Simulator + Oregon Trail with an isometric graphical style of Rollercoaster Tycoon. Maybe we'll throw in some Boy and his Blob in there too. Who knows!? At the very least, there will be jellybeans.

The general gist of the game is as follows...

You are the stockboy at Greengrocer's food cart in the East Calming Lands tunnel, where all manners of newspaper, fresh produce, meats, prepared foods, drinks and desserts are displayed to the passing simulated adventurers. Your main job is to keep the food cart's limited space stocked with items which will appeal to the customers passing by in the tunnel. Items can be swapped out as the time of day passes or as different "regular" customers queue up to order their usual things.

The purpose of this thread is to see if there might be any like-minded folks in the community who have experience with game design/development/art and would be interested in contributing to this project. A familiarity with the EQ resource files / textures / sprites would be especially helpful!

I'm not concerned that this format of game has been done a *million* times over. The goal with this is to get as familiar with simulation design as possible while working on something that truly interests me.

It might take me 20 years, Unity might be obsolete by the time I finish, nobody may end up playing or enjoying it, and I may lose whatever remains of my mind, but there's not really much left to lose at this point. So, whatever.

On my own, I will probably have a very hard time seeing this through to how I see it in my mind. With help from others, though, I might actually able to ... produce (hah!) ... something that resembles a game!

I'm using Unity (current version 4.61f1) to develop this. Please reply or PM me if you would like to help with this project!

Here's a quick snapshot of the prototype I have so far.

A. Basic "one-big-bag" Inventory system
B. Two "shoppers" that roam the tunnel

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[Portasaurus]

Just pasting some notes I've written so far with additional possible ideas for gameplay.


GrocerQuest

You start as the stock boy. Your main job is to provide goods to your boss, the Greengrocer, who sells food and other commodities in Borrath's central commerce hub: the Eastern Calming Lands Tunnel. Work your way up to open additional stores, and ultimately open up a competing store and put your former boss out of business!

At the start, you only have one item slot to sell food / wares.

As you progress, you can buy or earn more carts and apparatuses to sell a wider variety of goods.

Each work day begins when you arrive at the tunnel and begin preparing the store for the day.

The store will open at X AM each day. The store will close at Y PM each day.

Once the store is open, passing adventurers may choose to stop and shop at your store, provided they are sufficiently enticed.

At the start, your store can only accommodate one shopper at a time. Additional shoppers will need to queue up before they can shop. You may have more shoppers simultaneously shopping the bigger your store gets.

Different times of day bring different customers who will be looking for different things.

Part of the game is learning to identify what different adventurers want, and to make sure the store is stocked with appropriate items as to make the biggest sale and earn tips.

The players that you interact with will all be AI controlled.

Organizing your store so that similar items are grouped together will provide a bonus to how quickly your shoppers are able to find what they are looking for. Conversely, if your store is disorganized with fresh produce scattered across different aisles/carts, shoppers will take longer to finish shopping, which will lead to longer lines.

After waiting long enough in line without being able to enter the store, some shoppers (min/maxers) will become impatient and leave.



Possible extras:

An AM and PM "commute" phase, where you have to make it to work on time otherwise suffer a penalty in your performance grade, thus affecting your pay for the day. Items and stat upgrades can help you more easily complete your commute. Some encounters on your commute can yield ingredients or other items that you can bring to work and possibly sell.

Ability to send and receive tells from AI-controlled "players" which may lead to "quests" or other scenes where you can access new ingredients or upgrades for your shop(s).

Different weather prompting different *hot* items, such as ice cream on a hot day, or hot soups when it is cold and snowing.

Faction hits for selling/not selling to certain races (you reserve the right to refuse sale to any customer for any reason whatsoever, although this will rarely be beneficial) which may have other consequences (or benefits) down the road.

Ability to hire adventurers to hunt/gather ingredients for you at a price.

Ability to go out on hunting/foraging/fishing expeditions in your off time.

"World events" such as earthquakes (tunnel traffic reduced because everyone is out killing dragons), ban waves where certain customers are removed from the world, releases of expansions (in the newspaper as "new continents discovered!") which unlock new items and recipes.

Several possible places in the tunnel to move the cart (or open additional carts) with varying levels of foot traffic. You start in the back of the tunnel near the Unsavory Buckleswasher (your prime competition in the game). Leasing the space near torch 3, 2, and 1 costs more, so your business needs to be able to bring in enough revenue before you can maintain your store at those locations.

Compete against the Buckleswasher for customers. Possible extra: ability to sabotage or hire powerful adventurers to fight/kill him.

[Mandalore93]

You're a fucking luminary.

[Yumyums Inmahtumtums]

15/10

Let's do karate in the garage

[Portasaurus]

Here's a very short list of specific things I've already identified that I'll need help with at some point down the road:

1. Figuring out a way to rip item sprite assets from EQ. From there, I can import them into the current item database system that I currently have in Unity (credit to Austin from Awful Media's Youtube tutorials for helping me get both the inventory and the basic sprite movement working).

2.Developing a way to extract 2-d animations of the classic EQ character models running & walking in each of the four possible directions. As you can see from my prototype, I just have a single, non-keyed sprite of a wood elf and a halfling. This example actually illustrates some of the problems that I'm bound to encounter if I try to grab assets by recording images of the live game (lighting differences, scaling differences, inability to automatically key-out the background, etc...)

I'm not married to the isometric idea if it's going to make this infinitely more complicated than it needs to be. Going the route that they did in Airline Tycoon with a straight-up 2d plane might be easier and it may end up looking better in the end:

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[Portasaurus]

It only took about 6 hours, but I now have shadowed, editable shopper names appearing above their sprites as they walk through the tunnel.

I also started to play around with animation in Unity to get a crude walking animation going on the halfling.

Now, I'm going to drink [more] wine.

[Jigawatts]

Originally Posted by Portasaurus [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

It only took about 6 hours, but I now have shadowed, editable shopper names appearing above their sprites as they walk through the tunnel.

I also started to play around with animation in Unity to get a crude walking animation going on the halfling.

Now, I'm going to drink [more] wine.

Jigawatts says 'how much more?'

[Pringles]

Reminded me of this:

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Jump to 3:37 For the food http://youtu.be/KLQvTApN-60

[captnamazing]

I'm crying with ecstacy

[jarlerop]

As a person working daily with this kind of stuff i have no motivation to spend my free time working on projects like this, and i believe you will have a hard time finding someone qualified who wants in. Still, best of luck!