918 Grocery Bagging Like Diner Dash, Part I

I’ve always been a (mostly passive) fan of the Diner Dash game mechanic. It’s become somewhat of a trash heap with the introduction of mobile and free-to-play, but the core mechanic is still fascinating, whats essentially a multi-tasking simulator.

Mash this mechanic up with something puzzle-y like Tetris, or the Rush Hour board game of moving pieces around to make way for other pieces… and you get something that might feel like a grocery bagging simulator. I can see it going two different distinct directions:

The micro idea (new ideas)

• Working on a single grocery bag at a time and doing it quickly as possible
• Leve is a single shift as a bagger on one a single line, doing as many bags as possible
• Getting points for how efficiently you can pack items, with the fewest total bags
• Bonuses for not crushing any of the customer’s more fragile items

The macro idea (re-skin)

• Let focus on the specific bag of groceries (but maybe not entirely absent from the design)
• More focus on moving between lines of the grocery store, to keep customers happy and lines moving
• This style becomes much closer to just a re-skin of Diner Dash mechanics

There might be some interesting way to combine these two mechanics though, where the core gameplay happens at the micro level of arranging the groceries in the bags, but that there’s some aspect where you also manage the customer lines.

See this upcoming post for continuation of this idea.

[ Today I Was Playing: Faeria and Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Time and Diablo III: Ultimate Evil Edition ]

#time-management-game