GAME: Store Front

Game where you must maintain your vacuum shop whilst also harboring criminals at the same time.

— petermolydeux (@PeterMolydeux) September 24, 2013

It’s a tycoon game! You need to operate your vacuum shop to the best of your abilities in the classic vein of games like Lemonade Stand, but with a twist: the vacuum shop is just the commercial front for what is actually a mob den. The basics of managing the shop would actually be pretty trivial: each month (or week, whatever works) the gangsters would fund the player an allowance to pay the bills and maintain stock and so forth, and at the end of the month, if the shop fails to turn a profit? No big deal. The heists, protection rackets, and contraband dealings of the mob bring in more than enough.

So while the player would still manage purchasing and pricing stock, advertising their wares, and so forth, only a gross failure on the retail business end of things would end the game: if the shop is being run so poorly that it starts to eat up all of the gang’s actual profits, then it’s become more trouble than it is worth and the gang would have the player whacked. The more important responsibilities for the player would be to facilitate the gang’s activities in and around the shop while maintaining a believable storefront to keep the authorities from discovering their nefarious enterprises.

First and foremost, this would entail spatially furnishing the store to accommodate hidden caches for weapons, drugs, and the mob’s meeting room (which could be un-hidden, as long as it can be rapidly disguised as a mundane rec room, storage basement, or the like). Occasionally, police officers would conduct a search of the premises following simple, predictable AI – something like a tower defence game – so the player’s construction and arrangement of the shop would need to distract and redirect them until they are satisfied of the legitimacy of the storefront. It would also mean keeping the store’s books clean: if the store consistently fails to turn a profit, month after month, tax investigators would step in and attempt to discover the actual source of the shop’s income, perhaps requiring the player to “cook the books” in some manner of puzzle minigame. Finally, the player would need to prepare the store to defend against attacks by rival gangs.

As the game progressed, the player’s goals would revolve around helping the mob expand their operations by expanding the shop, laundering money through purchases and sales of vacuum cleaners, concealing ever-escalating amounts of contraband, fending off increasingly shrewd investigators and interrogators, and increasingly aggressive gang battles. As an eleventh-hour twist, the mob might lose access to a large portion of its funds late in the game and have to run one month’s operations on the legitimate income of the store. And, at the end of a well-played campaign, the player would be rewarded with a lengthy prison sentence courtesy of Jimmy the Snitch.