🛒 Shelf Life: A Simulator
Welcome to Retail Purgatory
Shelf Life is a grocery store simulator where you manage every aspect of running a supermarket, from stocking shelves to dealing with customers who treat the "10 items or less" lane as a suggestion. It's everything you never wanted in a career, now available as entertainment.
Build your store from a sketchy corner shop into a retail empire, one expired yogurt at a time. Just like real life, except the health inspector is an NPC and can be bribed with in-game currency.
Inspired by the devs' collective 47 years of retail trauma. This is our therapy.
Key Features
Features subject to change, removal, or spontaneous combustion.
Order inventory, stock shelves, and watch customers immediately put things back in the wrong place. Realism at its finest.
Customers who block entire aisles, ask if you have "any in the back," and bring 37 items to self-checkout. We modeled them after real people. We're sorry.
Balance your budget while paying employees enough to show up but not enough for them to care. Just like a real grocery store.
Hire, fire, and mediate disputes between Brenda from deli and Kevin from produce. Kevin knows what he did.
Store Departments
Expand your store with specialized departments, each with their own unique brand of chaos:
- Produce: Where fruits go to slowly decompose on camera while customers squeeze every single avocado.
- Deli Counter: Take a number. No, the other number. No, that machine is broken. Just yell when you're ready.
- Bakery: Fresh bread daily! The "fresh" label stays on for up to 72 hours. Nobody has complained yet.
- Frozen Foods: An entire aisle of meals that promise "restaurant quality" and deliver "survivable quality."
- Checkout: 12 lanes. 2 are open. One cashier is on break. The other is having an existential crisis. Good luck.
- Parking Lot: A lawless wasteland where shopping carts roam free and someone is always parked diagonally across two spaces.
The pharmacy department was cut after legal advised us that simulating prescription drug management was "a liability."
Development Status
Shelf Life is in early development, meaning we have a vision board, three Figma mockups, and a developer who swears they'll "get to it this weekend." Current progress:
- Store layout editor: You can place shelves. They don't do anything yet, but they look nice.
- Customer spawning: Customers appear. They don't leave. We're working on it. It's a metaphor for real retail.
- Inventory system: Items can be added to shelves. Removing them crashes the game. We call this feature "theft protection."
- Day/night cycle: The store is always open. There is no escape. This was a design choice, not a bug.
- Employee system: You can hire employees. They stand around. Very realistic.
Expected release date: After Grave Endeavors ships. So, you know, heat death of the universe.
Interested?
If you've ever worked retail and want to relive the experience without the minimum wage, hit us up on the Contact page. Mention "paper or plastic" and we'll know you're one of us.
Warning: Playing Shelf Life may trigger flashbacks to your first job. Dog Water Development is not responsible for any resulting therapy costs.