MV - Business sim in MV

This is an idea I've had for awhile. Imagine your favorite rpg, or any rpg that has stores of various kinds. Have you ever wondered how they stay stocked or how they maintain business? Not likely.

I have though, and I've wanted to explore that. My newest rpg project will tackle this question, and with any luck, I might not make it boring.

My basic bullet point ideas are the following:

• Manage up to 7 different stores of either one specialty, or all available ones
• Control employees schedules
• maintain stock and manage demand
• Time is calculated by week. Do all your actions you wish per week

that's all I've got for now. Any thoughts on this idea? Would it be something you would play, or am I wasting my time like always?

I think it is a marvelous idea! One of my favorite chapters in Dragon Quest 4, as well as rpgs ingernal, is the chapter of Torneko Taloon, which did something similiar. If you throw in some sort of ongoing plot in your game I would absolutely give it a try!

I'm still waiting for something good in that niche ever since I played Recettear. So yes, would definetly play it, but it would have to be damn good since Recettear set the bar pretty high for such a game!

that's why I wrote a number of quests involving a shortage of supplies :D

I haven't played Recettear. Is it an rpg maker game?

You should have asked Google that and would already know everything about it right now ;). Here:

It can be done, but it takes a lot of programming.
Fantasy Tavern (the first one, no longer available) did this with RMXP, but it rewrote a lot of the scripts.

Without good programming knowledge it is extremely difficult to do.

EDIT it's "fortune's tavern", not fantasy - and it seems that while the one on steam was taken down (the developing Team broke up in a bad way), references to it can still be found on the web.

If you make sure that the characters in your game from simple supplier to customer each have real personality and backstory and also invest int the character development side of things I think this could be a great game :thumbsup-right:

This sounds intriguing. Reminds me of Moonlighter which was all about stocking your shop, though for me personally I wish the world had been bigger that's why I'm really interested in your idea of having multiple branches.

This could be a great little time sink if you can pull it off right. Can't wait!

After spending some time trying to think of ways to do certain things, I decided to not even consider a story until I have some systems done. I'm having trouble figuring out how the player is supposed to make money. I'm also having trouble figuring out how it should be determined if a store is turning a profit or not.

I'm using EIS Shop System plugin found here: https://forums.rpgmakerweb.com/index.php?threads/eis-shop-system.63514/#post-694091

as my basis for a stockable shop but that seems to be as far as I've gotten. I really want to try to just go with 3 basic points within the game before expanding to more features.

1. Negotiate deals with civilians for stock you carry.
2. Gather very basic items, via recipe books. Each recipe book contains 16 items you can make. Potions and food mostly.
3. Weapons and armor can be obtained via negotiating supply deals with local or national blacksmiths.

The blacksmith point leaves me with a question too. One idea I have involving negotiating with a blacksmith involves a potential dialogue tree that could span many minutes. Would it be considered poor design or a lazy approach if I give the player an option to just skip the dialogue tree and do an auto fill of the necessary info, and only giving a summary at the end?

There will be more added to this as I build the game, but this is what I'm working on now. I'll be using names and places of an old game project that is now dead.