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[nerdpride]

I found this game for the first time yesterday for an SNES emulator, never found it before regardless of having an SNES (which broke recently qq).

It's amazing how much this game is similar to both The Sims and DF.  There aren't as many different mechanics as the Sims, but I still prefer it to any Sims game I know of simply because they add randomness and a money-making task that you're more involved in.  DF is annoying when it plays too slowly or when you feel like looking at something graphical.  I find it to be a nice compromise between the two games, it has stuff for kleptomaniacs, OCD gamers, and virtual-NPC-ophiles alike.  Of course there's no gore but I never liked that part of DF anyways.

I think it got boring faster than DF did though, for some reason.  Once you find all the tools, play with a couple of cows, and get married to one of the girls, there just isn't that much interesting stuff left.  There's only a tiny bit of randomness.

I want to make a game like this one someday, with a little more randomness included and more to explore, after completing a bunch of other projects.

Anyone else here ever play it?  And have any thoughts about what made it good compared to other games?  I personally don't see how "The Sims" games made money at all, but they're still continuing somehow.

[Gulfd'An]

i played a harvest moon for the gameboy and ya once you do all that it get boring.
But one time i googled it and there was 23 pages of secret stuff i never new about! so there is a lot to do at least in that one.
but it is still boring so i don't play much at all any more

[Sappho]

I bought the SNES version of this game the day it came out, and I had been looking forward to it for months thanks to a preview in Nintendo Power magazine.  I played it all the time for years.  I also have the N64 version, which is terrible, but then I never liked the N64 to begin with.  I haven't played most of the sequels, but out of those I have tried, my favorite is Friends of Mineral Town for the GBA.  Fabulous game.

But you're right, there's very little randomness to the game, and once you've mastered it, it's no longer fun.  Still, it can be a fun time waster when you don't feel like thinking too much.

[nerdpride]

Friends of Mineral Town looks even more time consuming than the original.  I was excited hearing about it because I thought it might fix everything, but it seems to only focus on the more time consuming parts.

I'd want to do more with the farm area, only leaving when you need to buy a handful of complex machines it wouldn't make sense to get from a farm.  Farmers have plenty of methods for getting production started without buying seeds at some store.

Waiting to upgrade the tools also gets a bit annoying, I'd rather just have the same tools all the time.  They'd have to be pretty good tools to compensate, like the upgraded ones.  Some kind of easier interface would be just as good as the tool upgrade, I think.  Like how the Dwarves perform semi-automatically.

Having a building system like DF would give a lot more room for creative input, sort of like how you could do funny things with the fence in the original.  It would've helped to be able to tear down the house or toolshed and put it somewhere else.

Plus I think the time constraints were too harsh.  A fatigue/hunger system where you don't need to get back in bed every ten minutes would be nicer.  It wouldn't quite fit into the crop-growing system as far as realism goes, but the harvest could be delayed to allow even more time to do important management stuff.

I could make a whole huge list of changes I'd like to see.  Shame the game producers would never listen.  Once the semester is over I think I'd like to start a C+/- project for an open source cheap graphics game like this.  It'll probably take longer than that, but I bet I could have a playable version out before going back to school.

Other developers probably started out like this, right?  Or am I just having a pipe dream?

[ November 23, 2007: Message edited by: nerdpride ]

[Sappho]

It sounds like you just want to play... Dwarf Fortress.

Harvest Moon was supposed to be simple, but with goals, like upgrading tools and buying new items.  It's not supposed to be a sandbox game where you start with everything and just do the same thing over and over.  The reason I like Friends of Mineral Town is that there are more goals to strive for and a little less repetition.

HM was never just a straight simulation game; it's half simulation, half RPG.  Your focus is your character, not the farm itself.  I think that's why things like hunger and fatigue are such a big part of play.  You're not organizing hoardes of farmers (or dwarves), just one person, so his personal needs become more prevalent.

Also, in real life most farmers really do buy their seeds from another company; they also buy their pesticides and fertilizers from companies, and don't take anything from their land other than the fertility of the soil.

I think you're probably right that the developers are never going to push the game more towards the simulation half and make it more like DF, but in my mind that doesn't make it less of a good game, it's just a different game.

[ November 24, 2007: Message edited by: Sappho ]

[nerdpride]

Hmm, I think you're right.

But I'd still like to fool around with it, since it sounds like a good project to get a handle on game development with.

Plus it sounds fun to have another game like this, it might even be received well compared to a run-of-the-mill fighting/adventure game.

DF with simple sprite graphics, no combat, only one character, and a different interface it is then.

I just don't know what to call it.

[Sappho]

Dwarf Hermitage?

[nerdpride]

An underground dwarven farm instead of a human one would be an interesting twist.  And a decent reason to not include romance.

All dwarves are good at mining, so of course you'd do that to get stone and ore that you can use to build stuff and to also free up room for a bigger farm.  I'm not sure about shrubs growing yet.  You'd eventually water plants using an intricate system of floodgates.  Plus you'd buy purring maggots and giant cave spiders (butchering dogs would be a little weird for non-DF players) instead of cows and chickens.  With the cave spider silk you could make clothes too!  Then you'd build fences to keep away the vicious, livestock-eating wild naked mole dogs.  In the rare event that wood is needed, the tower caps are available too.  

I don't know if I need Toady's approval, I'd probably do it like this regardless, it sounds like even more fun.  There wouldn't be rain, I guess that's not really important though.

Plus its easier to think of a name like this.  How many names could you possibly have for a game about a dwarven farm?  Dwarf Farm or Farm Dwarf, unless you got really convoluted.

[ November 24, 2007: Message edited by: nerdpride ]

[LSTAR]

Ahhh, Harvest Moon... The SNES's premier turnip growing simulation... Yeah, I can see the DF similarities.

[Gaulgath]

I remember occasionally renting it for the Nintendo 64. Good times. It was pretty easy to become rich, as all you had to do was:

a) sell your crops by placing them in a conveniently-placed bin
b) get paid for said crops
c) buy more seeds, leaving you with just a few G (I never figured out what they stood for. Gold? Grams? Grains?)
d) rinse and repeat
e)
f) profit!

And uh... there was a bug where you could get get one of the females to fall INSANELY IN LOVE WITH YOU (getting married was a requirement, I believe) just by showing her the dog you started out with. Repeatedly.

[Mephisto]

In Harvest Moon DS, getting money is even easier. You have to rescue harvest sprites. When all of the fishing team has been rescued, tell them to fish all through winter. You can easily get a billion gold.

Unrelated to the above, I have played every HM game besides the Playstation versions and Rune Factory on the DS. Well, I'm not counting the various games whose only change is allowing you to be female instead of male.

[nerdpride]

There's a lot of things I still don't get about the original game, like that monkey-figure in the hot spring sometimes, I'm not going to find the rest of these games before making a clone of it.  I'm pretty sure I've figured out enough.

What I'm really worried about is balancing the selling and buying price of crops.  If Plump Helmets function basically like Turnips, then I could just use those prices for them, but then I'd have to balance the rest of the game's scales around that somehow.  There isn't a crop analogous to the corn and tomatoes!

And then there's flavor.  Mushrooms don't reproduce like seeded plants!  I could give it spawn like what DF has, but that wouldn't be entirely consistent with what I know about Biology.  Even if it does have spawn, it would also have the ability to reproduce by spreading through the ground, eventually forming a Fairy Ring of the mushrooms.

[GauHelldragon]

FomT is love! Rune factory is lots of fun too. Too bad its utterly unbalanced ( hi2u mining )