> 2026-07-16

Casual two-person session that turned into a full game-design brainstorm. Yohannes gave a progress update on his solo Godot game — elemental status effects, aerial combos, and a confirmed cross-machine build — and the two riffed on the 'friend slop' co-op genre (Peak, Lethal Company, Content Warning, Phasmophobia) before Whit recapped the stalled Store Assistant CAPTCHA issue and the Deli Cheese Inventory idea. The real news: Whit and Yohannes decided to co-develop a new game together, working codename 'Project Big Mart' — a multiplayer horror-comedy set in a haunted, HEB-style grocery store — and spent most of the meeting drafting its game design doc live in a shared Google Doc.

2 attendees(Whit, Yohannes)

##topics covered

01.Yohannes's solo Godot game: implementing elemental status effects — an attack applies an elemental affliction to an enemy for a limited window, during which a second, different element triggers a reaction (e.g. fire + lightning causes an explosion)
02.Confirmed the game repo runs cleanly on a second machine, not just Yohannes's own — early positive sign for the project's portability
03.Drew status-affliction icons so players can see at a glance which element an enemy is afflicted with
04.Planned aerial combo system and jump/aerial-attack animations, plus a redesigned element-switch UI (a semicircle above the player instead of the current layout)
05.Commitment to a consistent pixel-art style and art direction across the game
06.'Friend slop' genre discussion — co-op games built around a shared space and simple tasks: Peak, Lethal Company, Content Warning, Burglars & Gnomes, Mecha Chameleon, Phasmophobia, and Among Us as an early popularizer
07.Appreciation for proximity chat as a mechanic that drives a lot of the genre's comedy
08.Yohannes's interest in eventually building his own friend-slop game, and the appeal of networking/server-side multiplayer as a new problem space to learn
09.Deli Cheese Inventory Assistant revisited — recap of Whit's conversation with the deli cheese lead about replacing manual weigh-and-log inventory with a photograph-and-AI-vision workflow
10.Store Assistant CAPTCHA blocker recap — Puppeteer still can't reliably get past HEB.com's CAPTCHA
11.Recap of Whit's HEB SXP suggestion-box submission (the Siri-shortcut product-location idea) from the previous meeting
12.AI reliability tangent — discussion of a real incident where a company's AI agent deleted a production database with no backup in place
13.Shared view that AI works best as an acceleration tool rather than a full replacement for engineering judgment, and that reliance on it should come with guardrails
14.New project decided: 'Project Big Mart' (working codename) — a multiplayer horror-comedy game set in a haunted, HEB-style grocery store, first-person 3D
15.Core gameplay loop drafted: players complete department tasks for points, periodically return to a break room to spend points on perks, then repeat — goal is to survive as many shifts as possible
16.Anomalies designed as the game's horror threat — they chase, interfere with tasks, and can kidnap or kill players; severity is meant to ramp up over the course of a run
17.Global 'haunting meter' concept — a store-wide (not per-player) meter that reflects how well the team manages anomalies; a high meter makes overnight restocking/cleaning fail, making the next shift harder
18.Team-dynamics subsystem: a stamina bar that depletes over time, refillable by 'slacking off' — risky because a manager who catches you docks your points; an upgrade tree lets players slack off undetected
19.Manager role design — can be an NPC or a player; earned by top task performance each shift, can be voted out by team pressure ('corporate') for doing a bad job, and can interrupt a player's current task with an urgent one
20.Department task brainstorm: Shelf Edge/GM (planogram resets, price-tag fixes, frequent seasonal changeovers), CFT (returns, damages, covering rushes), Central Checkout (ring-up, bagging, rotating between departments to avoid monotony), Curbside (outdoor tasks, more exposed to anomalies)
21.Fresh department tasks: Meat Market/Seafood (cutting, service case, meal simples), Produce (stocking, quality checks), Bakery (baking, cutting, cake orders and decorating), Deli (cutting/packaging, service case, hot-hold items, soup bar) — sushi and Texas Backyard/Floral tabled as out of scope for now
22.Ghost mechanic — dead players become ghosts who can vote on the next anomaly, cause poltergeist activity (knocking items off shelves, opening/closing doors), and haunt living players, so death doesn't mean sitting out
23.Game modes drafted: 'Basic Retail' (smaller groups, no fresh departments) vs. 'Retail Plus' (matchmaking, full fresh departments, scales to 32+ players), with NPCs filling unstaffed roles including a fallback NPC manager
24.'Skeleton Crew' mode proposed for when player count drops low — combined/modified tasks and possible perks rather than an outright loss condition
25.Win/lose conditions left open as a discussion point: lose condition settled on the haunting overrunning the store or no players able to continue; a flat shift-count win felt unsatisfying to both, so they're leaning toward either an endless mode or a Phasmophobia-style multi-shift mystery arc where players gather clues to cure the store's haunting
26.Yohannes volunteered to be the project's 3D artist, starting with low-poly placeholder art before refining the look later

##decisions & next steps

→New collaborative project kicked off: 'Project Big Mart' (working codename), a multiplayer horror-comedy game set in a haunted HEB-style store, co-developed by Whit and Yohannes
→Yohannes to start the game's repo and share it in Discord
→Two new Discord channels agreed on: a project-ideas channel and a general dev-updates channel where anyone can post progress on any project
→Big Mart's design doc and day-to-day development will happen outside of team meetings, with meetings used to sync on progress and direction

##notes

N/A

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