Working Title - The Gruen Effect

Concept Statement - 

In The Gruen Effect, you play as a supermarket worker who has just been fired. Now you’re free to wreak havoc in the store, weaponizing everyday supermarket items to exact your revenge! 

Genre or Category - Arcade/Action/Brawler

The Gruen Effect will be a simplified version of many games in the Brawler/Beat ‘em up genre, which typically see a player fighting off waves of enemies with various weapon upgrades and combos, played in a top-down or side-on perspective. It will have simple action-based combat in an environment that sees them facing waves of enemies with a small selection of weapons that they can obtain throughout a run.

However, it has elements that make it hard to categorise as simply ‘Brawler’, as it will have an isometric layout and larger map filled with items and enemies (as opposed to a simple horizontally scrolling world or individual screens like many classic brawlers) making it more akin to a Toejam and Earl-style adventure game.

However, due to the fact that The Gruen Effect is intended to be played in short bursts, I think the best classification for it is ‘Arcade’- a category that game marketplaces use nowadays for games that either invoke a classic arcade game feel, or are played in short ‘rounds’- both criteria that this game fits quite well.

Concept Creation Process/Area and Influences - 

The Gruen Effect is a reimagining of a (rather embarrassingly bad) game that I worked on in 2015, which had a similar focus on using supermarket items as weapons. The original intention for the concept was to create a turn-based RPG around it, and as such, it had grid-based movement and a 16-bit art style.

However, due to the fact that I think the premise applies better to a more action-focused game (and the fact that it would be very time consuming to try and build a turn-based combat system from scratch), I have elected to shift lanes. Since the original game’s creation, I have worked multiple jobs in retail, particularly supermarkets. The frantic nature of trying to move around a maze-like building packed with people while finding what you’re looking for as quickly as possible is something I experience a lot, and I want to capture with this second iteration.

The concept also became quite topical due to the pandemic and how it impacted certain facets of everyday life- especially supermarket shopping. Hearing stories in the news of fights breaking out over normally trivial items like toilet paper also invokes that panic that one can feel when being rushed through a supermarket. I want to subvert that feeling and make the chaotic nature of shopping fun by letting the player let loose and mow down people that are in their way with no tangible consequences.

Audience and Competitive Analysis - 

The style I’m aiming to achieve with The Gruen Effect is very reminiscent of flash games of the early 2010s, with digitally hand-drawn graphics and simple looping gameplay (in the sense that completing a ‘loop’ or a ‘round’ of said game isn’t a big time investment). Thanks to this structure and the simplicity of the gameplay, concept, and story, I suspect The Gruen Effect will appeal the most to younger gamers who play primarily browser-based games. As the Gruen Effect will have a cartoonish style and silly slapstick humour, it will likely attract the same demographic as now-defunct flash game classics like the Papa’s series (which also put the player in cartoonishly exaggerated versions of a retail workplace) which achieve their humour through absurdity and dramatisation of otherwise mundane settings. 

Similarly, I think the infinitely replayable nature of The Gruen Effect would suit people who use mobile phones as their primary gaming platform, as many mobile games follow a similar form factor, having relatively simple gameplay and clean distinction of ‘runs’ or ‘rounds’ so that the player can pick the game up for any amount of time, from a couple of minutes while having a break at work to half an hour on a boring car ride. 

Game Treatment and Concept Art -

The game will start the player off in a busy supermarket, driving a trolley, with an empty inventory (the slots of which will be displayed on screen). They cannot stop, only turn (and pray, as crashing into walls will damage them). Unlike in the original version, the game is laid out on an isometric grid, and has digitally drawn graphics as opposed to pixel art. The basic premise of the protagonist driving a runaway trolley has been kept, however (see above).

The player will have a “final paycheck” displayed on-screen. If it runs out, the game is over- it essentially functions as a health bar. To replenish the paycheck, the player must incapacitate unwitting customers to obtain more money from them. Getting caught by the supermarket's employees will lessen their paycheck, so they must be careful!

The player is able to steal supermarket items to use as weapons against both customers and employees that get in their way or attempt to stop them from causing a ruckus. Different weapons will have different effects, and they are single-use, so the player will have to think on their feet if they want to avoid getting caught!

The supermarket will be laid out so that shelves with usable items are clearly distinguishable from other shelves (like below), and the player will be able to press a button to take one of the items from the shelf and assign it to a corresponding inventory slot as they move past.

The game will have a high score counter that goes up when employees and customers are incapacitated, as well as a number of other conditions. I am planning to add achievements for things like a certain length of time survived, or specific conditions like only using one item for the whole run, and I also hope to add unlockable cosmetic upgrades (time willing) to ensure players are able to get some decent mileage out of the game!

References

• "ToeJam and Earl" Johnson Voorsanger Productions and SEGA, 1991 (image posted by ZeTomes at MobyGames)
• "Papa's Burgeria" Flipline, 2010 (image posted by u/nintendo4noah at r/flipline)
• "Trolley Troll" Caleb Reader, 2015

Side note- sorry for the inconsistency in image sizes and caption formatting, its mainly due to the fact that I can't for the life of me make the Devlog editor behave!