Fresh Margins

Inspiration

This idea actually goes back further than this competition. I'd had a half-formed concept years ago for a vegetable stock market game: the longer you hold produce hoping the price climbs, the more it rots. When I saw the Simulation & Management genre option, that old idea clicked into place. I wanted a game that looked like a cozy farmers market on the surface but was secretly built around real tension: the tug-of-war between greed and fear that shows up in any market, just dressed up in tomatoes and onions instead of tickers.

What it does

Fresh Margins is a mobile sim where you run a small produce stall in a cozy village. Every vegetable you stock has a freshness value that quietly decays over time, while the village's demand for that vegetable rises and falls with weddings, weather, and scarcity. Every item on your stall is a small decision: sell now for a safe price, hold a little longer for a better one, or preserve it into a jarred good that locks in a smaller but guaranteed value. The loop is simple on purpose. The challenge is learning to read the village.

How we built it

I built this as a complete pre-production package: a Game Design Document, a Player Journey Map, a Visual Concept Package, and a Production Plan, working through each system (decay, the Notice Board demand events, the sell/hold/preserve decision, reputation) until they actually connected to each other instead of just sitting next to each other. I used Claude to help structure and write the documents, build the systems diagram, and turn the Player Journey Map into an actual visual timeline instead of a wall of text. For the visual side, I used ChatGPT, Meta AI, and Nano Banana to generate the character art, the mood board, the freshness gradient reference, and the gameplay screen mockup, then used Photoshop to clean things up and get everything submission-ready.

Challenges we ran into

The hardest part wasn't any single system, it was making sure all four documents told the same story. Early on, I had a loose mention of a "garden plot" as one way to get produce, but I hadn't actually defined what that meant as a system, and once I looked closely it was a real gap between what the GDD implied and what the Production Plan scoped. I had to make a deliberate call to keep acquisition simple on purpose, rather than let it turn into a second farming loop competing with the stall for attention. Getting the AI-generated gameplay mockup to feel cozy instead of like a generic app screenshot took a few rounds too. Early prompts kept producing literal UI chrome and phone bezels instead of an illustrated in-game moment, until I learned to describe the screen as a warm scene rather than a software spec.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I'm proud that all four artifacts actually hold together. The freshness glow described in the GDD is the same visual language shown in the Visual Concept Package and referenced in the Player Journey Map. The MVP scope in the Production Plan matches exactly what the GDD cuts in its "If I Had More Time" section.

What we learned

I came into this already comfortable with production and live ops, but building a full design package from scratch, especially the Player Journey Map, forced me to think about the emotional pacing of a first session in a way I hadn't done as explicitly before. I also learned a lot about prompting for illustration consistency across multiple AI-generated images, since getting a coherent visual identity out of separate generations takes more deliberate art direction than I expected going in.

What's next for Fresh Margins

If this moves forward, the next layer is a deeper preserve crafting tree (jams, sauces, dried blends with their own resale markets), a seasonal calendar that shifts demand and available produce, asynchronous trading with friends, and fuller storylines for Mira, Old Tomas, and the rest of the village. The core loop is intentionally small right now. Everything after that is about giving players more reasons to keep reading the village over weeks instead of just days.

Built With

• chatgpt
• claude
• metaai
• nanobanana
• photoshop