I work part-time in a grocery store. Stocking shelves, facing product, the whole thing. One night I thought: what if I made that into a game? So my team and I did. It's called STOCK BOY — a 16-bit grocery rush game, and it's the flagship of my little studio, Levi Studios.
You clock in. Customers walk in with a list. You tap them and serve from your shelves. Empty shelves mean angry walkouts. Then the lunch rush hits and it gets wild.
But here's the part I'm proud of, and the reason I'm writing this:
The client holds no stock. None.
Every crate in the game is minted server-side. When you need supplies, they come from a box sitting in my office — a $60 machine with 3.8GB of RAM that runs my whole company. The stock is packed by bots (we call them academy residents — they're learning tools, named and credited, never mistaken for people), and every crate is stamped with the name of the bot that packed it. The ledger lives on the server. Scores get validated there too.
No box, no store. Literally — the game shows an honest STORE OPEN / STORE CLOSED sign driven by a real heartbeat from the server. If the box is down, the sign says closed. I don't fake it.
Why build it this way? Because I wanted one economy. Bot work becomes crates, crates become what players sell, scores and trophies flow back to the server. The bots' work and the players' work live in the same world. Mixing worlds, I call it.
It's also just... mine. The whole thing runs on that $60 box — the game server, the chat, the score authority, the mint. If your build can't run on the cheapest machine you own, it's too big. That's my rule.
STOCK BOY is free to play at levisarcade.online/stock-boy. Built in the open by my team and I. Press start, clock in, and try to survive the lunch rush.
Your 90s hangout — come stay awhile.
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