Building a game is great and all—and a lot of people have made terrific games loosely based upon vague premises that are lazily slapped over with a coat of story-paint.

pleck’s mart started as a story concept

In fact, the whole idea for Pleck’s Mart was originally a sketch for a piece of creative writing set in a speculative fictional universe (a universe where I happen to set a lot of my creative writing these days including the entirety of an actual novel called “The Underfoot” which is getting close to publication-ready.)

Pleck’s Mart was going to be another novel—or a maybe a short story—or maybe—well, I didn’t exactly know.

Well, it sure might make an interesting video game-if I could figure the game part out, I thought to myself.

So, here we are.

Of course, it will be a challenge to fit the entirety of a novel-worth of story into a little game, but that doesn’t mean that there is not a lot of lore going on in the background.

its a science fictional supermarket

As I try to explain the “what” of the game to folks who don’t generally game or who don’t generally read quirky speculative fiction I was often leaning into the term “trans-dimensional shopping simulator” or similar overly-clever twists of phrase.

They didn’t get it.

Then I came up with a simpler way to put it: Pleck’s Mart is a game about a science fiction supermarket, and both the supermarket part and the science fiction part are important.

The supermarket part is important because it represents the core mechanics of the game like running a store, ordering, stocking, and selling to customers.

The science fiction part is important because, well, setting, story, thrill, and quirky weirdness that drives the backbone of why the mechanics of the game exist in the first place.

Mash those together and you get something interesting, I hope:

A story spanning dimensions.

A quantum mechanical quirky economics simulator.

A roguelike with aisles and products instead of dungeons and monsters.

An interdimensional portal in the back room of a food shop.

Or, just, a science fiction supermarket.

Stay tuned for more details and maybe even some of that “fiction” could be posted here soon.