Welcome to the Next Millennium Mall. To ensure a pleasant shopping experience, please observe the following rules:
Rule 1: If you hear the merchandise whispering, please remain calm. They will return to silence shortly.
Rule 2: After checkout, please replace your head with your purchased merchandise. If you are unwilling to do so, you must at least cover your head with a shopping bag.
Rule 3: Fireworks are strictly prohibited within the mall. If you see fireworks, immediately seek assistance from a patrolling scanner.
Rule 4: When the broadcast advises you to run, you must flee immediately.
Rule 5: All clocks in the mall are stopped at 23:59:59. However, should you observe a clock running, please jump and cheer loudly until we are able to find you.
Rule 6: There are still stores operating in the atrium. They are highly likely to be safe. If you treat the shopkeepers kindly, they will treat you kindly in return.
The Y2K Shopping Guide is a surreal card-based narrative game inspired by The Backrooms, New Weird, and Dreamcore. The player is trapped inside a massive mall filled with eerie rooms and wandering “object heads.” Fortunately, the player discovers stores that are still operating and relatively friendly shopkeepers. Therefore, to escape the mall, the player must purchase items to assist them on their adventure; during the adventure, the player can collect resources needed by the shopkeepers, thereby building connections with them, learning their stories, and uncovering the truth behind this mall.
In this project, Tianze Shao is responsible for gameplay design, copywriting, and developing, while Xinyuan Wang is responsible for the art.
Figure: The Atrium: a safe room for shopping, alongside a store unlock pop-up window
Figure: The ratty’s kitchen and its owner, Ratty
Figure: Adventure phase: Using items related to “imagination” to tackle challenges in the Spaceship Book City
Why make this game?
In CS377G and CS247G, I created two interactive fictions (IF). These IFs were linear, like a movie, requiring me to design every specific moment of the player’s experience. However, this time, I wanted to explore new possibilities—to build a “theme park” that doesn’t preset a linear experience, but rather allows players to interpret the story through their interactions with the space. This idea likely stems from my love for the Souls series and Cultist Simulator; rather than “telling a complete story,” these works feel more like “writing a lore book.” An excellent “theme park” scatters lore throughout the game, uses mechanics to spark curiosity (much like the castle in Disneyland), and provides players with the means to explore, thereby immersing them in the world.
The Y2K Shopping Guide attempts to achieve this: in the current demo, I have designed 5 stores, 5 shopkeepers, over 30 items, 9 explorable rooms, and some secret crafting recipes. The shopping-adventure-shopping loop guides players to engage with these elements at their own pace, while the story acts as the underlying connection. Take the story of Miss Phonograph and her sister, for example: during your adventure, you might see a woman with a cassette tape for a head frantically playing the piano. Then, from the description of a dropped item (a cassette tape, which is her head), you learn about a music competition from years ago: the genius tried to escape, while the hard worker envied the genius. When you give the cassette tape to Miss Phonograph, there won’t be a lengthy dialogue cutscene. She will simply pause her business for three days, and then a tear-stained old item will be added to her shelves.
Figure: The audio-visual store “Nocturne”, and the story of the cassette tape (top right)
Stage 1: Brainstorming
Initially, I wanted to make a curatorial game: collecting items, using them to tell stories, or even making up stories (e.g., finding a normal teddy bear and claiming it’s cursed). However, this felt a bit repetitive compared to my previous game, Otowa Blues. I tried to simplify my thinking and figure out what I truly liked—it was the “stories within items,” rather than the “curation.” Once I figured this out, a bold idea emerged: since the items themselves contain stories, why not let the items become your head, so that others can see your story at a glance? That’s how the “object heads” concept came to be.
Object heads are often associated with grotesque and surreal aesthetics. I happen to enjoy browsing the Aesthetics Wiki (https://aesthetics.fandom.com/wiki/Aesthetics_Wiki), and I had previously imagined: could I make an “aesthetics gallery” game that integrates these various styles, which share a sense of nostalgia and eeriness? A mall was the stage I chose. First of all, a mall is inherently a place where “various styles coexist.” The mall is full of merchandise, the merchandise are heads, and perhaps they whisper to each other after dark. A friend of mine mentioned that this also serves as a metaphor for consumerism and human alienation.
Figure: Some contemporary internet aesthetic types on the Aesthetics Wiki
I designed some mood boards and presented the conceptual art during a meeting. The feedback from Christina and my classmates was highly accurate: creepy cozy. I hope this game can evoke a sense of nostalgia in players, accompanied by a feeling of unease, yet ultimately settling on warmth. In a dilapidated Y2K mall, you befriend a few object heads and watch the millennium fireworks together with them.
Figure: Early mood board
Stage 2: Mechanics Exploration
In a mall, “shopping” is perhaps the most natural mechanic that comes to mind. However, if there were only shopping, would the gameplay just be buying low and selling high? A management simulation? To me, that wasn’t fun enough. Therefore, I added a “crafting” mechanic: after purchasing items, they can be combined to create new things. In the game’s lore, this mall is isolated from the world, and many common items (like roses or cola) cannot be found here. The protagonist can conjure up these items and give them to the shopkeepers to advance their stories. In my vision, the protagonist doesn’t have a single line of dialogue; instead, they express their choices by offering different items—a form of procedural rhetoric.
The crafting system went through several iterations. At first, it was based on polyominoes, but I quickly realized that “geometric puzzles” and “experiencing a story” are hard to coexist. Players would perform narratively nonsensical syntheses just to make the geometric shapes fit (like combining a pile of screws to make a teddy bear, simply because screws are 1×1 and easy to fit into the puzzle).
Figure: The polyomino version of the crafting system
Subsequently, I introduced four “shapes of night,” somewhat akin to the classic elements of earth, water, fire, and wind, or the “aspects” in Cultist Simulator. These four basic elements symbolize different facets of the night: light (the night clears the mind), tear (the night brings sorrowful memories), dream (the night sparks inspiration), and sleep (the night offers rest). They also correspond to CRPG-style verbs—for instance, light aligns with “investigate,” tear with “empathize,” and dream with “imagine.” Crafting involves infusing different shapes into items. The initial UI, shown below, only included three item slots. When I explained the mechanic to a friend, I found it took 4 minutes, and my friend was still confused. This prompted me to redesign the interface, using an “astrolabe” layout to display stats and potential recipes. After this iteration, my friend said it was much clearer.
Figure: Before iteration: only three slots
Figure: After iteration: using an astrolabe to visually convey more information
However, one problem remained unsolved: what could players do with the goods they bought? In the original design, players would receive purchasing commissions or deliver an item from Store A to Store B. After submitting the item, they would see some story, and that was it. This might have fit the “cozy” tone, but for me, it wasn’t fun enough. When introducing the game to friends, I could only say “it’s a game about buying things,” but purely buying things left players lacking motivation.
Adhering to the design philosophy that “a game must be fun,” I made appropriate changes to the story, injecting more New Weird and survival horror elements, turning the merchandise into essential supplies for the player to explore the mall and survive. After this change, I believe the intended “creepy cozy” experience was actually enhanced: the presence of the “creepy” serves to highlight the “cozy” nature of the safe rooms. If it were only cozy, players like me might find it boring.
Future plan
Currently, I have completed an early demo containing the full mechanics and the content for the first floor of the mall. The more polished parts include the art for the atrium, the UI design, the in-store interactions, and the items. Areas that still need refinement include the tutorial, copywriting details (currently using some AI-generated placeholder text), the art and mechanics for the adventure phase, as well as music and sound effects.
By building the demo, I feel I have found a pretty good direction. The “adventure” (exploring the mall, finding an exit) provides a logical outlet for using items, the “shop-adventure-shop” loop is a classic game structure, and the “crafting” system offers richer strategic depth and a sense of exploration. However, the “adventure” mechanic is still something I need to further polish through playtesting: it can’t be too combat-heavy, or it will ruin the “creepy cozy” atmosphere; nor can it be too focused on “semantic puzzle-solving,” which would lead players to look up guides and turn the game into repetitive stat-grinding.
Next, I will continue to polish the demo and conduct playtests as soon as possible. Once I am satisfied with the demo’s quality, I want to try an open playtest on Steam and itch.io. This project uses some AI-generated art assets, which I believe is a reasonable use case given the game’s aesthetic style, but players’ attitudes towards this remain to be tested.
Reflection
First of all, my experience over the past few weeks has been completely different from being in a classroom. In class, I learned fast-paced design: rapid prototyping, rapid playtesting, and rapid iteration. During this development process, I constantly reminded myself of the importance of prototyping and playtesting, yet I still haven’t conducted formal playtesting. The reason might be related to the type of game I chose: it’s a “theme park” style game that takes fragmented narrative as a design goal. When the game doesn’t have enough content, it’s hard to find a “testable core.”
As an alternative, my way of testing was to pitch the game to others. As mentioned above, this method pushed me to iterate on the crafting system and design the “adventure-driven shopping” gameplay. When I found it difficult to explain a mechanic clearly, or when I couldn’t feel the fun from my own pitch, it meant the game needed adjustments. The weekly Friday meetings were also crucial. Even though this project is more ambitious and harder to create a demo for, I still had to present something every week rather than just keeping it as an “imagination in my head.” A game is a complex experience; if you don’t build it, you won’t know if the ideas make sense. Creating is also a tool to help me think clearly—I shouldn’t worry too much about “wasting development time.”
Furthermore, I learned a key thinking skill: simplifying the premise and returning to the origin. Whenever I came up with a game concept, many accompanying ideas would pop into my head—perhaps mechanics from other games, or narrative fragments. Previously, I would try to string all these ideas together to form a coherent story. But as the game’s scope gradually expanded, linking various ideas became impossible or made the work mediocre. This quarter, through numerous walks and draft design documents, I realized a truth: when there are too many ideas, you must start killing them off one by one, until you find the one idea you absolutely cannot bear to kill. That is what I truly want to make, what I am passionate about. The “object heads” and the mall were ideas born only after I figured out what I truly wanted.
Finally, I want to thank Christina, Butch, Janet, and Elline. In our weekly meetings, your suggestions and recommended works were deeply inspiring to me. Without the requirement of an assignment, self-driven game development took more energy but yielded less sense of accomplishment, even reminding me of a failed game development experience from a few years ago. However, the platform you provided kept me going, and your encouragement let me know that “this can at least move some people.” This also reminds me to seek out similar platforms in my future indie game development to maintain a healthy creative state. Thank you, and I hope to continue contributing to this team!
In addition, I want to thank Xinyuan Wang. Xinyuan completed the vast majority of the art design work, and her excellent aesthetic sense is the foundation that allows this work to convey its intended experience. She is a professional, friendly, and highly efficient collaborator, and I look forward to continuing to work with her.
Thank you for reading. Please add The Y2K Shopping Guide to your wishlist!
Demo link: https://kmjhamster.itch.io/the-y2k
