One red paperclip is the story of Canadian blogger Kyle MacDonald trading his way from a single red paperclip to a house in a series of fourteen online trades. The idea of "trading up" is an underlying theme of The Shop At World's End.

Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale

Recettear is the story of a girl who finds herself in charge of an item shop built into her house. As Recette, you have to decide how you'll get your stock, how much to sell things for, what the shop should look like, and how to best go about getting the money Tear needs to pay off the loan. Managing store stock and haggling prices is the main game loop for The Shop At World's End.

Innawoods

Innawoods is a paper doll interface that can be dressed up with different equipment, mostly with an apocalyptic theme. "In case of emergency, grab sks, go inna woods". This simplified cartoon aesthetic is the art style planned for The Shop At World's End.

The Long Dark

The Long Dark is a winter apocalypse game that embodies a key concept in The Shop At World's End, that people value equipment differently depending on the situation.

Player Experience

In a simple storefront interface, the player will manage barter offers with a rotating cast of Non-Player Character customers, each with a profession and home location that affects their valuation of items. The player must learn how to compose their inventory, how to value items in a barter exchange, and how to establish trading relationships with recurring characters.

Platform

The game is developed to be released on Windows PC.

Genre

Singleplayer, RPG, casual.

Target Audience

Simple concept and interface so casual players can play a few turns in their spare time, randomization and variety so obsessive players can spend hours optimizing and replaying.

Concept

Core Gameplay Loop

Bartering

A pool of NPCs with different professions and home locations will visit the player's shop, bringing with them an inventory of goods that the player can try trading for. The player will select some of the NPC goods and some of their store goods and make an offer to exchange.

If the NPC agrees to the exchange, the goods are swapped and the NPC leaves the store, allowing another NPC to visit. NPCs have an attitude rating based on their prior experiences in the store and the offers made by the player. If the player demands too much, the NPC will become irritated and leave without making a trade.

Stockpiling And Events

Events will randomly occur that alter the valuation of goods. Limited player inventory space means balancing for opportunistic stockpiling versus active use in day-to-day trading.

Spreading Favorability, Unlocking Locations

Each NPC has a home location, when their favorability towards the player is increased (due to good trade deals) or decreased (due to bad offers or no trades), the home location favorability increases or decreases. If a location reaches 50 or higher favorability, it is unlocked and a new cast of NPCs from that location join the NPC pool that visits the player's shop.

Players must manage which customers they give favorable deals to in order to access more customers from locations with goods they want. Some locations can only be reached by first becoming favorable with their neighbors.

Ending

Under most circumstances, players will choose when they want to quit, spending as little or as much time as they want building their shop's value and the reach of their trade network (visible both from the Logs page and the Game Over summary). Unlocking all 5 locations during normal play could take between 30 minutes and an hour, once players are familiar with the approximate values of the items and favored goods of the professions.

Theme Interpretation (It's Spreading)

Spread your trade network to access resources not available locally.

In order to attract customers from distant locations, the player will need to increase their favor with representatives from those locations, and when a location is unlocked it will grant access to more representatives from even farther locations.