And so the submission period for the Pompous Trash Jam 2025 has come to an end. This is as good a time on any to reflect on the project.

No Truce With the Groceries is a Disco-like point-and-click set in an American grocery store. It is, on one level, a playable shitpost; what The Witness is to the Looker, so you might say, Disco Elysium is to No Truce With the Groceries. But this isn't merely a trash jam, it is a pompous trash jam. Despite some of the over the top and sometimes goofy situations, Groceries does have a few things to say.

Origin

I've made a few games over the years. You've probably not played them. A common thread that runs through them, though, is that it would be accurate to call them pompous trash. A retro roguelite RPG where instead of a great hero, you play the town drunk? Yep. A text game about the dissolution of the British Empire submitted for a surprisingly serious horror game competition? Also yep (aside: it did as poorly as you'd expect in the competition, but went on to win the most niche award in existence at the end of the year). That's really the only sort of game I make. When I saw Society of Play's Pompous Trash Jam, I knew I had to enter.

I linked the jam our local game dev group, Tri Game Dev. I shopped a rough sketch of the idea. Another member joked that we should team up and make the game. I say "joked" because that is a running joke for us: we always talk about teaming up for a game, but never do.

Well, this time it wasn't a joke (or maybe it was and we really committed to the bit). That other member was the incomparable Gerald Burke, the other developer on Groceries. He had been, for some time, kicking around a game idea about American mythology. It was the missing piece that completed my design. We immediately started planning.

The Jam

The jam started auspiciously. By that, of course, I mean we got literally 0 work done the first weekend. ETSU Con is the flagship event of our dev group, so that's where we were. Oh well.

When building a jam team, one of the suggestions is to compliment your skill set by partnering with people who specialize in different things. Well, we didn't do that. Gerald and I could both be fairly described as writer-programmers who also have eclectic, generalist game dev skills. That's how we ended with heavily edited photographic backgrounds and highly abstract portraits. We did have a bit of a guerilla photography session in a local grocery store as part of the process, which was fun.

As with making every game, it's a learning process. One of the first pieces of content created was a 1600-ish word storylet about buying potatoes. It turns out that was not the winning strategy. The quantity of text was a bit much, given that we needed something like 40 to 50 storylets. Also, a lot of the paths are just words; they don't interact with the systems. The later storylets were between 300 and 800 words, for the most part, with almost all of their paths interacting with game systems. That was both a lot more manageable (especially at the jam scale) and better design.

Like every jam, there just was not enough time. Deadlines are double-edged swords: they drive you to accomplish things but also do not permit taking things to their conclusion. There are a few features that I consider absolutely core to the game that had to be cut. One of which was about 20% finished 3 hours before the jam's end. I simply did not have enough in the tank at that juncture to push through, but so it goes.

I'm still proud of what we got done. I think Gerald described it as a "playable novella," and that's apt.

The Game

Disco Elysium is about something fairly momentous: a murder investigation. It also has an inescapably post-Soviet context that a lot of people, especially on this side of the pond, tend to miss. Groceries takes that approach, moves it to the States, and makes it about the most banal thing possible: a trip to the supermarket.

What does it mean to be American? It's a topic of much debate, some of which, it turns out, is a bit too topical for comfort. Even putting aside current events, there are a lot of contradictions faced in daily life here. We are by any reasonable measure a very rich country (GDP adjusted for purchasing power parity: #2, GDP PPP per capita: #7). And yet, things like healthcare  and higher education are out of reach, housing is a struggle in most places, and the price of food was an issue that may have decided the most recent election. I guess we get iPhones or whatever (for now), but what good is all that wealth if we're struggling for the basics? That is one of the motivations behind a lot of the content.

Identity is another thing the game grapples with. For practical reasons, we ended up ditching the idea of a character running around a map (our original design called for low-poly 3D!) early in the life cycle, which turned out to be a good thing. If we show the player character, the player will make some assumptions. A first person view sidesteps that. A lot of what I wanted to do here got cut to meet the deadline, but one way or another, I do plan to get that in the game.

The Future

There is a lot more that I want to do with this game. I have made the mistake of falling in love with a jam game before, though. If you played No Truce With the Groceries and have thoughts, I would love to hear them.