I don't hate the romance portion of the game. I just think that it's usually implemented in such a flimsy, shallow way, that it wouldn't make the game any worse to just remove it entirely. If anyone has suggestions on how that aspect of the game could be improved (and maybe remove the farming part), share!

This satire doesn't work very well at this very moment when some real muslim civilians are killed by the dozens daily because of their country being invaded by a retard president with an army of trigger happy morons.

But that is exactly why satire is needed! If nobody was actually being killed by trigger happy morons, there would be no point in making a game like this. Satire is a form of critique.

yep .. i did ... but i don't have anything good to tell about the game ... so i prefer not to talk ... anyway ... i want to forget that there is a game like this that in this forum " where most of it's member enjoy killing muslims "

Nobody here enjoys killing Muslims. I would have thought that was obvious from the comments, but maybe it's not obvious enough.

I see Sigvatr has pulled the game and posted an apology. What can we learn from this series of events?

- Don't ever do satire? (This can't be right)
- Always explain your satire in simplistic terms? (It would be sad if this was necessary)
- There are Some Subjects which are always inappropriate for satire (I disagree with this)
- Keep the parody a bit more subtle, like in the case of Cannon Fodder?

Maybe subtlety is the best solution.

Actually, that would solve the problem which most business games have: they get easier, rather than harder, as you progress.

I totally agree with the ideas about making it possible for the player to lose. This is totally key. It should be like Nethack as well, you can't save except when you quit.

(Too many plant types makes more work for the developer with very little payoff, IMO. 6-10 per season would be optimal?)

You could have a procedural system for hybridizing? I would want there to be a payoff other than money for competent farming.

    * Allow and promote greater expansion of your farm. A problem, I think, with the series is that there's no reason to expand your farming operation beyond a certain point. You get a big house, a big bed, and more cash then you need, on a 9x3 farming plot. There needs to be a reason to increase your farming operation beyond "money" because money is worthless when you have nothing to spend it on. You should be able to make a huge orchard and you should have a reason for doing it.

A big part of the problem with this in existing harvest moon games is that every time you plant more fields, you have to do that much more daily watering, so there's an incentive never to expand your farm. The best way around this, in my view, would be to put the work into designing reasonably intelligent farm hands, who were available for hire. You could put them on the repetitive jobs that you weren't interested in. Maybe they spend the first day of the season watching what you do, and then they try to replicate it? But sometimes they mess it up, too.

    * Festivals should be important. Win unique prizes from unique games. The Tomato festival in Back To Nature or the easter egg hunt from the original are both excellent festivals.

I like the idea of time-relevant activities, since I think part of the point of Harvest Moon is to make you aware of the passage of time - watching plants grow, people age, and seasons pass. They don't have to be festivals though... it could even just be unusual weather: flash floods force you to sandbag the farm, or a solar eclipse unsettles all the animals.

I also want to say that I think you could keep it quite close to HM, with avatars and townsfolk, or even go totally radically away from it, and still have a good game - and it wouldn't have to be SimFarm. When I heard they were making 'Puzzle de Harvest Moon' I was super excited - the farming system could be the basis of a really interesting puzzle game. They blew it though.

It's fun just to try to figure out if there's a path through these maps where you can touch every square (like Q*bert) while only going downhill.

[YES.]

Yeah, these are fair points. I don't want to design Sim Farm, because that wouldn't have the addictive appeal of Harvest Moon. On the other hand, I wouldn't care if the design diverged quite a lot from the Harvest Moon template so that it wasn't Harvest Moon anymore. I want to take what's good about Harvest Moon and leave the rest out. So... what's good about Harvest Moon?

Also: make it set during the Great Depression.

I love this idea

I would suggest that you keep the town, but tie in the economy of the town with how well certain crops sell and what prices are set.  Put in a few computer controlled farms, too.  Don't get rid of the town, just make it integral to the game, rather than a cute little side distraction.

YES.

[no town]

Harvest Moon. Every single iteration in the series is horribly designed, and yet strangely addictive and compelling to play.

I find the *idea* of harvest moon fascinating. I don't mean the idea of owning my own farm. I mean the way that the concept sets up a deep, replayable completion-game, like Diablo or (to a much lesser extent) Pokemon.

When I think of Harvest Moon, what gets me excited is the idea that I will start with several packets of poor-grade potato seeds, and a patch of dusty sand, and after 50 hours or so of hoeing, sowing and watering I will have a hybrid watermelon-banana which has never been seen before in the world, and which I can sell for a billion dollars.

Yet for some reason, Victor Interactive never manages to deliver on this promise, and in fact the newer games often strip out this kind of depth in favour of adding extraneous 'cave' quests or cooking or fairies or what have you.

For example, the PSP's recent 'Harvest Moon: An Innocent Life' strips out the idea that different crops come in different qualities, so there is no reason to try to improve your farming practices. And you can tell exactly which plants to grow at which time, because the optimal plants will be the only ones on sale in the town store.

The worst thing a Harvest Moon game can be is shallow, but the second worst thing it can be is arbitrary. If I have to try every possible permutation of watering, fertilizing and planting in order to find the optimal method for growing an A-grade zucchini, the entire process of the game becomes a grind. The design should enable me to draw clues from each crop cycle: the portion of the eggplant crop that was under the tree wilted and died - so I should try to plant them in full sun. Or, the weeds by the old well are yellow and brown - maybe I shouldn't plant my crops there.

I want to love Harvest Moon. Instead, I'm just a slave to it, like someone who's addicted to mud pies.

But it doesn't have to be that way. I think we could have a farming game which delivers on the promise of Harvest Moon, and it wouldn't even need to be a high-budget commercial title. It could be the next indie breakthrough.

I feel like Harvest Moon is making millions and millions of dollars because it has the monopoly over this niche. Like any monopoly, the lack of competition has meant lack of progress. I think there is an opportunity for someone to release a game, which we could code-name 'Good Harvest Moon', which turns that niche on its head. So what would you change?

Here are a few ideas to kick things off:

• Remove all the unnecessary stuff: no marriage, no giving stupid gifts to the townsfolk, for that matter no townsfolk, for that matter no town. Maybe even no farm animals. No fishing. No dog. No horse. No mysterious fairies or moon-buggies. No dying roboticist. No rune factory.
• Increase the depth of the core farming game: variable weather, variable soil, variable seed quality. And a million different types of plant.
• I think the basic hand-watering, hand-sowing aspect of harvest moon is part of the addictiveness, but it needs to take a lesson from Diablo: when you click the mouse or press the button, BAM.
• I would also consider a more dramatic change: eliminate the avatar completely. Take a simcity-style view of the crops. Click a square of soil to water it.
• I think it would be more engrossing if there was some kind of consequence to having a bad year. The simplest thing is if you have to eat the crops to survive. A drought, followed by a blizzard, and you run out of food, and die.
• It would be awesome if the simulation was robust enough that you could employ permaculture theories. Establish shade by planting hardy, tall shrubs in dry sandy soil; the shade allows the soil to stay moist, so a citrus tree can grow, helping to bind the soil and desalinate it. Then, you can grow food crops between the citrus trees.

This would actually make an awesome iphone game. You could allow the player to fire out more than one rope at once.

I love this game, and I want to thank you personally for making it in Flash, so I can play it on my mac and share it with all my friends who would never download a game. 

WWII Game Compo...

take the most overdone, beaten-to-death formula, and give the prize to the person who successfully reinvents or reinvigorates the concept. We could save the games industry!

WTF first of i didn't play the game or even read the replys here
i hope it is not as it looks like cause am muslim and **** *** if so .

Just out of curiosity, after you wrote this did you go and play the game or read the comments here?

I think you don't always want to adapt the story, as most of you seem to be suggesting. For many books, the best thing is to use it as inspiration for a new mechanic, not to try to recreate the exact events of the book.

For example, you could do one based on Anne McCaffrey's book 'The Crystal Singer'. It would be a falling crystals game like 'Bejeweled' except that when you sang a note into the microphone, a the crystals would resonate and vibrate. If you sang the right note, you could resonate a particular colour and cut the crystals. It's 'singstar' meets 'bejeweled'!

Most Philip K. Dick books have interesting ideas but boring stories, so you should adapt the ideas rather than the story (which is, after all, what they did in writing the script for 'BladeRunner'.) If I were to adapt 'A Scanner Darkly', I would go with the fact that there have been hardly any surveillance games. A game where you didn't realise you were surveilling yourself. But otherwise, the story would be quite different.

An adaptation of 'Day of the Triffids' could be a game about trying to help people to survive when they've all gone blind. (If you think about it, 'The Sims' is like trying to help a group of people to survive when they all have severe brain damage and no nursing care. Oh no, you've wet yourself again!)

As for Camus' book 'The Stranger' or 'The Outsider', I don't think we need an adaptation of that because nearly very computer game is an adaptation of it. In the sense that you are a player in a world whose characters and events you don't really care about. We players are true outsiders in the world of videogame characters.

In this age of heat-and-serve, frozen, chocolate pancake-wrapped sausages, pretentious is a complement.

Speaking as a pretentious person, I concur. 

I know people will say I am taking this too seriously, but...

I don't think the problem was the safe zones. I think the problem is that you can keep on robbing the same dog over and over. If you're patient, it is just trivial to keep robbing the right-most dog.

You could easily remedy this - just make it so the coin won't respawn unless you've stolen from a different dog first. That way you're forced to move between the three zones (which is what makes the game hard and interesting).

I still maintain that the game should get faster every 100 points (even if this does make me creepy). All the old nintendo game n' watches used to get harder, at least up to a point.

You could make a game where players have to drag the scenery in order to get to the goal.

Like, played using the mouse and stuff.

Yeah, or a pseudo-2d driving game (like Outrun or HangOn) where your joystick controls the curvature of the road, while the car in the middle moves randomly left or right. That would be totally awesome!!!

Similar ideas:
- A flight sim where the plane zooms around randomly, and your mouse controls the orientation of the world
- A platform game where the direction keys control the location of the nearest platform, and the protagonist jerks and jumps spastically all over the place.
- A breakout clone where you keep trying to build the blocks back up.

I just posted my first app to the store. It's not a game, it's just an experiment really. The game is coming along well though! One of the nice things about their setup is that once you have all your paperwork done, you can just go crazy posting games to the store.

I really hope a few indie devs get on board - the iphone could be the ultimate indie gaming portable!

My point of view on this is that making flash games can either benefit or detract from creativity.
 
1) Clearly there are many (even a majority) of flash game developers who just make awful clones with no love. Bjork said 'imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, but it is also a kind of flattery that robs you' and I think that all the 'tower defense' clones are in a sense robbing Paul Preece.

2) On the other hand, since it is so quick to build and deploy games in flash, you are freed to be really inventive and creative with your designs, and still make money. You also get a bigger audience, which is creatively rewarding. If cactus was making his games in flash, he'd make a very healthy wage and millions more people would get to experience his games.

For my last flash game - admittedly a casual game - I spent a few days making it and then without any effort at all, I got offers from two aggregators who wanted to license it nonexclusively for around $1k. If I bothered to send out a few emails I could have done this half a dozen more times, and if I had made a really good game like DinoRun I could have demanded much more money each time.

I didn't make that game to make money, but I admit I did spend a few minutes thinking about who the target audience would be and what kind of ads to put up.

For me, this means I just make the game I want to make, with love, and then money rolls in, which would never happen if I was making a downloadable game.

(Downloadable) indie games and flash games have something in common, actually - short play length and low development budget. I think what's exciting about indie development is that it is a return to the creativity of the late 70s and early 80s, where one or two guys could make a game on their own in a few weeks, and take risks. Putting your game on flash means that you can make a living this way.

I think indie devs should look at the state of flash gaming - see the huge audience, and also see the terrible quality of the majority of games - and look at it as an unexploited niche. I so wish I could share games like 'you got the grappling hook' with all my non-gamer friends who have macs.

I think for the hours people put into it, Wurdle is worth way more than $1.99.

That's not the right way to think about it. You have to compare the hours you put into it to the total revenues you make.

Congratulations on your success, by the way!

[realism vs surrealism]

Also, a 'realism vs surrealism' compo. The aim would be to bring realism to genres which usually don't have it, and non-realism to genres which do.

Examples:
Realism:

- a platformer called 'Don't Sprain' where your guy can only jump as high as a regular person, and you twist your ankle if you fall more than one foot.

- a top-down shoot-em-up called 'Gun Jam' where you have only 50 bullets total to play the entire level.

- a 'Bejeweled' clone called 'Untold Riches' where you get a huge number of garnet, agate and quartz jewels, and very rarely you get a sapphire or ruby and you go 'oh shit, how am I going to get two more of these???'. You know you're dead if you get a diamond.

- a JRPG called 'Princess Squinty' where the heroine has normal-sized eyes and you can clearly discern that she's Japanese.

Surrealism:

- A driving simulator called 'Outrun' where your car flips over spectacularly every time you hit a small object. A driving simulator called 'Boost Forever' where you can accelerate literally to infinity.

- A stock market management simulator called 'Stock Market Smash' where giant monster attacks on Wall Street influence your portfolio.

etc...

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