Alright, so today I wanna share a bit about this little thing I was tinkering with a while back. I ended up calling it ‘shopping couple’ in my notes. Wasn’t anything revolutionary, just one of those random ideas that pops into your head, you know?
I’d often find myself people-watching, especially couples in stores. It’s pretty amusing, isn’t it? You’ll see one person super enthusiastic, grabbing all sorts of things, while the other is clearly just dragging their feet, looking like they’d rather be literally anywhere else. Or sometimes they’re trying to coordinate off a list, and it turns into a minor debate over every item. So, I thought, hey, maybe there’s a simple little app or a game mechanic in that. Something to capture that whole dynamic.
So, I started to sketch out some basic ideas. Fired up my usual set of simple tools, nothing fancy. Thought I’d try to whip up a quick prototype. You know how it goes – you think, “Ah, this will be a piece of cake, a weekend project at most.” Famous last words, right?
But then, as I was trying to figure out how these two digital ‘shopping couple’ characters would interact, or how an app might manage their shared (or disputed) shopping list, it kinda got me thinking. It wasn’t just about picking items off a shelf in a game. This whole thing felt… well, it felt deeper than I first imagined.
That moment it all got a bit too real
It seriously reminded me of my sister and her husband when they decided they needed a new TV. Now, you’d think buying a TV would be a fairly straightforward task. Nope. Not for those two. She had her heart set on one of those super sleek, artsy-looking ones, the kind that’s more like a picture frame on the wall. He, on the other hand, was completely fixated on the technical specs. His list of demands was something like:
- Absolutely must have an insanely high refresh rate.
- Zero tolerance for input lag, mostly for his gaming.
- It needed all the latest HDR formats, most of which I don’t even pretend to understand.
She, meanwhile, was mostly concerned if the color of the frame would clash with the living room curtains. They were in that electronics store for what felt like an actual ice age. I was getting text updates. The whole thing escalated into a proper saga.
They weren’t just discussing a television at that point. It was pretty clear they were negotiating their entire philosophy on home entertainment, how they’d spend their evenings, maybe even who held ultimate power over the remote control. It was like watching a high-stakes diplomatic summit unfold in the home appliances aisle. And there I was, trying to design a cute little game about a couple picking up groceries without starting World War III. My little project suddenly felt incredibly trivial in comparison.
So, what happened to the actual ‘shopping couple’ project, the coding part? Well, I did manage to cobble together a very basic version. I got two little pixelated figures to waddle around a crudely drawn supermarket. They could even pick up some equally badly drawn boxes meant to be products. But that was about as far as it got. My motivation just sort of… deflated. The real-life drama of shopping couples was just too compelling, too nuanced, and honestly, way more entertaining than anything I could quickly code up.
What did I take away from it all? I suppose sometimes these little side projects are less about the final product and more like thought experiments. They get you observing the world a bit more closely, thinking about how people tick. And this ‘shopping couple’ idea, it mostly taught me that trying to accurately simulate real human relationships, especially when shopping budgets and personal tastes are involved, is probably a fast track to a very complicated and possibly frustrating coding session. Or maybe just a fast track to needing a strong drink.
So, that ‘shopping couple’ concept, along with its few lines of code, is probably still archived on some old hard drive, gathering digital dust. And you know what the funny thing is? My sister and her husband? They eventually bought a projector instead of a TV. They called it a ‘compromise’. I’m still not entirely sure who actually won that particular negotiation. But it sure as heck wasn’t my little game idea, that’s for sure.
