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[Bennett]

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.

[cyber95]

Your suggestions make it entirely not be Harvest Moon anymore.

[Nate Kling]

I liked harvest moon but I don't know how much I would like the game you are describing,  it does sound kind of cool but I liked getting married, talking to towns people and doing all that stuff.  I think its a major part of the game.  What you are describing seems to me like you should just be a farmer instead of playing a game as one. I never really thought about it but harvest moon isnt really just a farming game. To me, it seems like a very literal RPG.  You play the role of that character and its strange that he has such a mundane life yet the game is so interesting.  No zombies to kill or impending doom to stop.  Just growing crops, making your house bigger and scoring chicks haha.  So maybe it would be better with a more in-depth farming simulation but I liked all the other little things that you got to do.  I always wished you could go to other towns though.  I would say that it would be great to go the other way and make the other parts of the game more in-depth as well.

[neon]

Your suggestions make it entirely not be Harvest Moon anymore.

that's true.  that's like taking world of warcraft and saying, "OK, let's get rid of raids altogether, instances, let's get rid of grinding, and actually design the game intelligently".  it would be great if it happened but the game wouldn't be the same at all.  i think you might find that in getting rid of the things you listed as "unnecessary" and etc, you might actually lose a lot of what gives the game charm.  you wouldn't end up with a terribly designed game with a bit of charm and fun, you would end up with a farming simulator.  which is totally fine, and being able to implement permaculture theories would be awesome.  i think a farming simulator would be better than harvest moon and etc etc if it was done correctly, but it would also cease to BE harvest moon. 

but - i think more along the lines of what you outlined would be great, and i'll come up with more ideas for it as time goes on.  but just remember that it wouldn't be harvest moon, not at all, and that is totally ok.

[Seth]

Yeah, I'm all for improving Harvest Moon, but your ideas make it sound more like a SimFarm, which if I'm not mistaken there already is one?

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.

Also, make it so you can focus on dairy farming, crop farming, or even running a slaughterhouse.  Have the ability to hire farm hands that you can have a personal relationship with them.

Also: make it set during the Great Depression.

[Hempuli‽]

I agree with most points here, but the game you described isn't Harvest Moon.
It's Farm Tycoon.

I think the best kind of Harvest Moon would be like the SNES one, but with those planting things you mentioned, like not growing plants under a tree etc etc. Marriage, dog, horse and that kind of normal stuff could still be in. But indeed, that rune factory you mentioned sounds like a thing that shouldn't exist.

[Bennett]

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.

[Inane]

Just the remove town and get rid of avatar points are what causes it to be a different game, I think.

My main problem with the series is that it's impossible to lose. You can't starve to death, your animals only die if you're an idiot, and your wife loves you forevs once you marry her (Well, I dunno I've never tried hitting her with an axe or anything)
It's particularly annoying how the one game that did improve the series (The first gamecube one) was also boring and days took what seemed like an hour each, so those fuckin' developers decided to scrap ALL the changes made.
This game had people dying, player aging, selective cow breeding (and a super annoying system that forced you to breed your cows in order to get them to lactate ), and uh something to do with seeds that I only vaguely remember.

So to expand on Benzido's bullet list. (Shouldn't a bullet list be called a gun?)
    * Increase the depth of the core farming game: variable weather, variable soil, variable seed quality. And a million different types of plant. (Too many plant types makes more work for the developer with very little payoff, IMO. 6-10 per season would be optimal?)
    * 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.
    * Have some base requirement of productivity. Taxes, starvation, spendin' money for your wife, etc. If the player doesn't meet 'em (Well, excluding that last one) he should be in trouble, but the game shouldn't end yet. He could recuperate with a loan, but it's sort of a beginning of the end thing, as the overall requirements are upped by the loan payments.
    * Make seasons have variable times. Long summers lead to droughts and long winters reduce the growing season. This should add a good amount of luck to your year so you can actually FUCKING LOSE.
    * Make markets have a artificial supply-demand model. Some years tomatoes sell low, some years zucchini sell high. Worst case scenario, market constricts so much that there's a limit on how many of the product they'll buy
    * 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.
    * 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.


 

[Bennett]

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.

[Valter]

Also: make it set during the Great Depression.

You would start out as a wealthy plantation estate owner, with hundreds of workers and the largest output of plants in the USA. Unlike other Harvest Moon games, though, you wouldn't be growing more successful. As the depression hit, stock in your plantation would plunge, sandstorms would ravage your farm, and starvation would loom around every corner. your farm would grow steadily more downtrodden, losing fame and money with each day. The goal would be to manage your rapidly decreasing amount of capital for long enough to make it out the other end of the depression.

Actually, I think that would be really cool. Most business games have you starting out with nothing and accumulating everything. It would be cool to have a game where you start with everything, and then steadily lose power until you're scraping for every penny. It would be about survival: instead of maximizing gain you would be trying to minimize loss.

[Bennett]

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

[William Broom]

I have never played Harvest Moon so I'll just rush in here, drop some ignorant suggestions and leave:
- One of the tasks should be defending your crops from damn wild animals with a shotgun
- Your wife should leave you if you can't support her. Other times you get a 'bad wife' who requires ridiculous amounts of money to support - in this case, you need to divorce her before she divorces you. Divorce too often, though, and you get a bad reputation.
- You should have a stress meter that rises when things go bad and decreases gradually, especially during festivals. Alternatively you can use beer as a quick escape from stress. But if you use beer too often you become an alcoholic and your stress constantly rises whenever you're not drinking.
- it should be in space
- It should be just like Earthblades Don't Mourn for Burnmules

[Hempuli‽]

your wife loves you forevs once you marry her (Well, I dunno I've never tried hitting her with an axe or anything)

Haha, I could imagine a special sidequest where you started with killing your wife, and gradually turning to a massacre.

[skrew]

to get rid of the problem of more boring tasks like watering your crops when your farm gets bigger, how about being able to buy tools in the town that let you dig a primitive irrigation system by diverting the creek or something.

Also, ideally if the game was robust enough you could have it with multiple starting scenarios, one where you start with almost nothing and build a farm from scratch and another where you start with a massive estate in the great depression.

One thing, that i always loved about the snes version, the only version I played, were the lovely pixel graphics, I think to keep the charm of the whole harvest moon fantasy you would need to have keep a similar style.

[Danrul]

Off topic:  A bullet list should be called a clip, and adding to it should be called reloading.