Dream Market Simulator

You inherit your father's corner shop the week a chain store opens across the street, and the job is to turn it into the biggest market in the district. The design splits the work in two. On the shop floor you carry boxes, stock shelves, count out change at the till and catch shoplifters before they reach the door. At the shop computer you order stock, hire cashiers, cleaners and stockers, pay the bills that arrive every morning at eight, take out loans and trade a small crypto market with your spare cash. The floor is where the money is made, and the computer is where you decide what to spend it on.

Around that loop sit the systems that keep a day from repeating: a reputation score built from five categories that changes traffic, prices customers will accept and how often VIP customers turn up, online orders you pick, bag and deliver across the city against a timer, a wholesaler with cheaper stock that changes every day, a random event drawn from a hand of cards every third morning, and an XP curve that gates store expansions. A chaptered mission chain teaches each of these in turn.

This was our graduation project, built by a team of four under the LOWS studio name. I was the lead developer, working alongside a second developer, a 3D artist and a game designer who kept the design document. For testing we built an in-game console with commands for money, time, reputation and spawning customers, so any state in the game could be set up in seconds instead of played into.