okay it is fascinating though how all these "here's a wholesome game where you play as a small business owner" rely on like. an endless flood of customers just Existing, none of them having any characterization, none of them presenting any problems, just faceless guys
like, every single shop management game i've played EVER does this. i'm not sure this is a bad thing? i'm curious about it though. fascinating thing. is that just necessary?
Let's say you're the shop keeper in a historical Europeanesque village. Well, what kind of shop and village? Usually a workshop, or else temporary on market days with imported goods or the fruits of labor/farming/gathering. Is the village poor or rich or middling?
Maybe the player gets to choose or randomly roll the above types of setup. Ok so, customers are either neighbors in the village, or strangers from outside it. When a neighbor comes into the shop, the player is presented with a two step choice: first, a choice out of 3 traditional interactions the player character's relationship with this neighbor involves; second, a choice of how generous or stingy the player wants to be in approaching their obligation in that relationship. Then it goes into a conversation influenced by the apparent prosperity of the player's shop and the customer and the needs of each character. The important thing is, all these interactions will be remembered later, and important flags like "player manipulated the conversation with personal details" or "player was generous" or "player is usually stingy" will make a difference.
Strangers have a different choice, depending on if they have a traditional relationship to draw on (such as an agent of the local Lord who isn't well known to the village), or not (a travelling merchant or mendicant). There isn't necessarily an ongoing relationship with the stranger characters, but what the player chooses to do with them will have especially large effects on their reputation with their neighbors. And not the same as if the same were done with a local; a player character's normal generosity being swapped for driving a hard bargain with a wealthy traveling merchant might get mad respect for example, where doing so with neighbors might make trouble with them.
Endings could be based on the player character's legacy when they pass away. Did they become a rich miser? Did they ever marry, and is there a child to carry on their legacy? Did they scrape by barely having anything but sharing what they had? Etc. With some special endings if particularly difficult to achieve results at found and performed.
Honestly sounds like a cool af game design and I think it could be very cozy. A minimal version of it wouldn't even have to be huge, if it were condensed to something like 5-10 turns of major interactions, and for an MVP version eliminate all variables of which interactions and which shop, just make one combination as more of a kinetic story. I could see it at the scale of a simulator with procedural generation though, and that version fascinates me.
Two thoughts before I get started on my pitch:
- Check out Touhou Mystia's Izakaya, where a major aspect of the game is catering to specific 2hous and their tastes - it's more of a cooking sim than a shop sim, but you do have to interact with customers as People.
- I really really love the above idea and would play the heck out of it in a heartbeat, especially since:
One of the core pieces in the above that isn't in a lot of other shopsims is that building of relationships in a complex way - Recettear has a single stat for each class of customer that determines How Much They Trust and Like you - and that's important. The customer's needs are modeled any more complexly than "what they want right now" and "hey, I want you to get me something in N days".
There's also just.... a noticeable lack of interaction with other merchants outside of Plot. Other shops might be opening, closing, pissing out customers, or what have you but there's never any sort of... reason to worry about the rest of the economy other than when Events through an Event system happen.
So my idea.... is very directly inspired by the early episodes of Spice and Wolf which I watched in undergrad one afternoon and then assumed the rest of the show was Like That. But, just the idea of instead of being a shopkeeper in a fixed location, being a travelling merchant, carting goods between towns and forming a part of a macroeconomic system of trade.
My vision is, like, you start off in a town with some money that you use to buy goods based on what you've heard about what people in other towns need - a fire burned down some buildings three towns over, so you load up on lumber. The harvest festival is soon, so you buy various crops from a farming village to sell in towns with other goods. Maybe you talked with someone in particular, so you pick up a few small goods for them in particular.
And then you're off to visit towns, to buy and sell goods in the next towns over. As you go, there's probably a small handful of townspeople you interact with per town, especially at first - a local merchant, maybe the local innkeeper where you rest. But as you go, learning about the town and the needs of the people in that town, you can start to anticipate what you'll wanna pick up and start planning Travelling Salesperson paths through the map. Especially since your cart only can carry So many goods (and as you get close to your limit, the travelling process slows down)
Of course, there's other merchants doing the similar paths. Sometimes you'll get scooped and you'll be left holding the bag on a bunch of goods that you'll now need to offload somewhere. Sometimes you'll be able to work together with fellow merchants to supply goods or trade goods to make sure stuff going to various towns. And sometimes you'll stumble backwards into a great deal you didn't realize you were scooping from another merchant.
There's tons of room for interesting play here, especially since the time cycle of the game would want to happen on the order of multiple days at a time - travelling from town to town takes Time and needs to be accounted for in the planning. This introduces a slower pace that would allow for relationships to be developed over a longer timescale compared to Potionomics or Recettear's month or two of gameplay.
I really love what @IkomaTanomori wrote for how endings would work in this sort of space - what's your legacy? How did your grow your relationships with other people? Did you fall in love with someone, and did that person stay in a town keeping a home while you're on the road - or did they join you as a travelling companion? Did you raise capital to build a shop somewhere and settle down, or even just retire?
I just think there's a lot that can be done with the shopkeeper-genre by simply flipping from a stationary shop to a mobile one.