924 Grocery Bagging Like Diner Dash, Part II

In the recent post Grocery Bagging Like Diner Dash, Part I I discussed the idea of a time management game mashed up with a puzzle game, set in a grocery store checkout line.

I can’t find a relevant example image, but I’m picture it as a top down view of the lanes (see image below, but imagine it less isometric, and more straight down).

The player would start their career controlling a single bagger, who had to jump between three lanes and manage days of grocery shopper’s bagging needs. As the player succeeded, and the levels become more challenging, potentially the game would allow the player to recruit a team of baggers, up to 5. The game would evolve in its mechanics to allow the player to manage them successfully.

Visually speaking, I’m picturing the game as a split view (like 3DS), where the bottom of the screen is the bagging mini games that happen (with it being split up the 5 bagging UIs at once for your eventual expanded team). The other screen used to manage the overall store, and which lines you’re taking care of, and the view customers coming in and which types are lined up. If it wants to take a page from the Diner Dash book, it would allow the player to drag and drop people into the lines they choose. That could be one type of strategy (more of a classic time-management system), or the other could be that the customers choose their own lines and the strategy is how the player moves across the lines (or where to assign baggers later in the game).

It feels to me like the gameplay loop could be a little like Plants Vs Zombies in some ways. So much so, maybe there is some resource that the player needs to collect on the top area of the screen, or events that happen like spilled juice or a customer in need of help, and the bagger must pause their bagging duties to help in exchange for a helpful resource that assists them in the bagging mini game.

The mini game could potentially take many different forms, for example a tetris-like where the player is moving groceries around a “board” (the grocery bag) and arranging them in certain ways, gaining bonuses for efficient organization or for speed. The type of customer the player is bagging for may determine what types of groceries they have, for example someone might have a lot of heavy groceries (maybe weight is a variable in the mini game), or bizarrely shaped items.

[ Today I Was Playing: Crypt of the Necrodancer and Diablo III: Ultimate Evil Edition ]

#time-management-game