So I'm playing Supermarket simulator. And if you notice TCG Simulator looks VERY similar. That's because it uses the same assets. It looks like it's actually the same shop location, on the same street. But in one game, it's a supermarket, and in another game, it's a card game similator.
But if you look, the neighborhood outside of your walls of your shop all looks very dead. Like you're in a movie set, where the rest of the town is actually just wooden building backdrops.
So I figure, what if each "shop" could be a real shop? You play online, and when you log on, your shop has an individual save data. It gets played on a server, and each server has a different set of shops.
So if you're a retro game shop, you're playing in the lot of land number 14. So when you log on, you're looking for a server that doesn't have anyone playing on land lot 14. That's the retro game shop.
When you log on, you can't have infinate time, since time needs to always be moving for everybody else at the same pace......but time also doesn't stop at 9pm, and the deliveries don't stop either. So at 9pm-8am, you restock your shelves. You order backstock for your storage room.
And the shop right next to your retro games shop? Maybe that's the supermarket. That's land plot 13. And you can go into the supermarket, and you can buy things. Just like real life people can come into your retro games shop and buy things.
There's also NPCs obviously, who would be the bulk of the customers.
But the neighborhood would actually look busy, and alive rather than one guy hanging out on a movie set.
And so, you could play supermarket simulator, and someone else could play TCG simulator, and someone else could play gas station simulator, and someone else could play retro games shop simulator, and when you you play online, you're all on the same server, on the same street, and there could be an actual economy. Customers come in, spend their money on you, you spend some of your money at the gas station. There could be a wholesale simulator, where you play the shop the other shops are ordering from on the market. So like when you order furnature, or things to stock your shop, they have to be in stock at the wholesale simulator. Which means the guy who plays that role, affects ALL the stores on the server. Because if he just lets shit go out of stock, you use the competitor, which is automated, and always in stock, but at higher prices.
Ive played in a few of these. It's an absolute blast once you get your settings dialed in and balanced to everyone else. If they're not, then the player in the smallest game tends to have a lot of downtime.
The only downside is that the participants need to be familiar enough with their chosen game to do a randomizer which means roping in casual players is difficult.
Also, there are a massive number of unsupported games that you can play like this that are not part of the main website. https://multiworld.news/apworlds.html
Casual players can be fine with some games. Some actually become easier with Archipelago (e.g. Noita, Risk of Rain 2) since you're getting meta-progression between runs that normally wouldn't be there. Others though are especially punishing for new players (Doom comes to mind - you have to be pretty intimately familiar with the levels. There's keys hidden in secret areas sometimes, for example, and ammo can be very scarce.)