I have held off posting my next devlog update as I wanted to wait until I had something tangible I could share with folk.

For the past six months, I’ve been hard at work taking my original “Haunted Charity Shop” idea, iterating and play testing on the core gameplay until I was satisfied that development was going in the right direction.

We’re still very much in the preproduction phase, but I think there is now enough of developed concept to show to people.

With that, let me introduce you to…

Community Spirit!

You play as the ‘Charity Store Manager’ who has taken over several shops in the post-war new town of Amsterlee.

With the town suffering from years of decline, your goal is to help support the local community, using the profits made at your charity shops. Unfortunately, the donations you receive have a habit of being possessed, threatening both you and your customers.

Select your volunteer, sort and choose your stock wisely, then open the doors and both serve and protect your customers from the threats your donations bring.

Roguelike gameplay with a ‘Shop Volunteer’ class based permadeath system, and Overcooked style time pressure gameplay.

What’s Next?

While the above demo is not balanced or polished in any way, it provides a solid core to continue iterating from, where some of the ideas next on my list to look at include:

• Actual threat mechanics like hunting mannequins rather than ‘Darkness’ to threaten both shoppers and yourself
• A class based volunteer system, where you select your latest volunteer to man the shop (retired nurse, out of work thespian)
• Procedurally generated shop layouts, scaling difficulty and complexity with shopper and threat mechanics
• Narrative mechanics as you walk from the bus station to the store
• Additional store locations including a high street ‘Second Hand Item’ shop and an industrial park with a ‘Furniture’ theme, each with their own distinct threats and mechanics

Going Forward

When I made my last devlog post six months ago, I was intending to post on a regular monthly cadence, but backed out of that as the game wasn’t mature enough to really show anything of worth.

While there were plenty of low res technical prototypes I could talk about, I wasn’t convinced the effort to create those posts was worth it, given the amount of time one of these entries takes me to write.

With that said, I think the game has matured enough now for meaningful updates to start coming much faster.

Like any new undiscovered project, you don’t start producing meaningful output until you’ve put the hard work in to discover how you’re going to build something.

Questions such as “What engine am I building this in?”, “What am I using to build the environment?”, “How am I going to animate my characters?” are all critical to answer before meaningful progress can be made on developing the game concept.

Since I’ve now put in the work to answer those, the above demo was built almost from scratch in Unity in about 6 weeks, including asset creation such as the level design in Blender and animations in Spine.

They’re not at production level quality, but what took me 2 weeks now takes me an afternoon…