You can raise and lower terrain and alter water flow. The biosphere is poisoned, but if you can play well enough, you can plant and raise anything from food to kudzu vines that attack people. Would you find the concept interesting? Most of us here probably won't find gardening interesting. But I suspect that's because of the gameplay and the result. If the gameplay ranged the traditionally gruesome to the "kind and fluffy," would it be more appealing?

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More specifically, imagine this: You can genetically engineer plants and mix in nanotech and biotech. The only rules are that: 1) You have to acquire the genes, some of which are illegal to use (like human genes) 2) You must experiment with mixing and matching (something like Morrowind's alchemy, but it has to be more interesting... I haven't got an idea on this just yet) 3) The result you put into the ground has to be raised in a process where you apply different items to fight off threats, change the land to bring water, and even protect some crops from wind, acid rain, and animals

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The results would have between 1 and 4 traits: * Edible: Can be sold as a food supply or used to build up a community * Beauty: Can be sold as a rare art item or used to flatter someone * Trap/Weapon: Has defensive or offensive qualities, such as a toxin or entangling ability (also might raise the art value to some sadistic collectors) * Hardiness: How easily it overcomes the biosphere and spreads (possibly creating disasterous changes across the land) Does giving gardening more "cool" results make the gameplay more appealing?

I think that if you're going to go the biotech route, it should be broader and shallower.

Broader: Don't limit it to plants. Let the player tinker and tamper with everything from the grass on his lawn to the cats in his barn to the soldiers in his army. Whatever changes the biotech induces would be accompanied by a "flag" of varying strength. If a guy has three arms, one of which shoots lasers, then any fool knows he's tweaked. On the other hand, a mushroom that emits nanotransmitting spores that serve as surveillance can only really be detected with a sensitive scan.

Shallower: Don't get too crazy about individual polypeptides. Make a sort of mini-game out of it, and let players deal with a heavily parsed genome. Want to adjust a plant's growth rate so that it can disable a moving tank? Just use your DNA-tron 8000 to bring up the "growth and development" section of its genetic code. Then you can run trial-and-error tests (or apply a commercial "patch") to get the desired effect.

To be honest, I'm a little afraid that both biotech and nano tech might be redundant, rather than complementary. Why not just attribute this game mechanic to nanotech, and forget about DNA? Same end, simpler means.

I would try this game just for it's quirkiness and I hate to be clique but it would definitely come down to execution.

However, I think the subject matter is going to almost preclude this being anything but an indy project as it will not have mass appeal unless you can somehow design it to have heavy puzzle elements. I don't know how you would sell this to a publisher.

1. Raising/lowering terrain - How does this impact the gardening? Is this just for building water channels?

2. DNA, etc. - Sounds interesting. Also, plants hybridize. Could you make it simple enough to teach hybrid genetics in the process of playing and make this a fun game mechanic? Anyway, that is my suggestion for the mixing/alchemy thing. . . sort of cheat and make them all one "species" and allow hybridization between all of them and make different traits dominant and recessive and follow the rules of true genetics in your code.

3. What is the goal? Am I gardening for fun or is there a competition? Am I making crazy kuzu vines to attack people?

4. Tending the plants - Excellent place to make a puzzle as tending plants in Harvest Moon became repetitive and not all that fun pretty fast. Harvest Moon was pretty fun, but you tended the farm for about half the day after getting going and then did the dating sim or the "adventure" for the remainder. I'd suggest making this a combination of strategy (how you set up the farm - how did you hybridize for hardiness or weakness, etc.) and puzzle (Connect the blocks to free up water, kill bugs etc.) or action (sort of Harvest Moon-ish but faster and more eventful - FIGHT the bugs off or time the pump for irrigation, etc.)

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1. Raising/lowering terrain - How does this impact the gardening? Is this just for building water channels?

Sied meyrs Alpha Centauri: The higher areas trapped more water. The trade winds were assumed to blow in one direction (i.e. left to right), so a mountin's left side would trap water and the area to the right of the mountain was dryer, even desert like if you had enough mountains. Think the Rocky mountains.

Plants grow better at certin elevations, i.e. you stop seeing trees above a certain altitude. Assuming different planets, the air pressuer is differnt at the same altitude. I.e. on a high gravity planet, the air presser as sea level may be too great for plants that grow at sea level hear on earth.

Could make depressions to capture water and make wetlands.

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To be honest, I'm a little afraid that both biotech and nano tech might be redundant, rather than complementary. Why not just attribute this game mechanic to nanotech, and forget about DNA? Same end, simpler means.

Nanotech can be more porsisly controlled but needs more instruction. I.e. you can send a signale that inactivates all/some of the nanites in an area, give them new instructions, etc. Nanites need to be manufactured (even if by other nanties). Nanites need to be programmed.

Biotech is less controllable but can operate on its own. Breed two viruses in the hopes of getting what you want. Once you have released them, they can contnue to change and adapt to the world, possibly getting out of control.

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Original post by Iron Chef Carnage Don't limit it to plants. Let the player tinker and tamper with everything from the grass on his lawn to the cats in his barn to the soldiers in his army. Whatever changes the biotech induces would be accompanied by a "flag" of varying strength.

Hmmm... with the caveat that you have to capture life, or (in the case of people) shanghai or persuade them?

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If a guy has three arms, one of which shoots lasers, then any fool knows he's tweaked. On the other hand, a mushroom that emits nanotransmitting spores that serve as surveillance can only really be detected with a sensitive scan.

Argh! I wish I had the power to do procedural animation! There have to be limits to this based on graphics. But stat variation, which is the backbone of my approach, is doable. I can't probably give you a guy with a third arm (*uh, that's proscribed technology and... uh... nobody knows how to do it...sorry*)

But I can give you a guy who has a flesh-based damage resistance of stone. If I can vary textures procedurally, maybe I can give him what look like scales. This enough?

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Shallower: Don't get too crazy about individual polypeptides.

Ugh, most agreed. (Reminds me that there was once a game that had a minigame where you realistically sequence DNA. It was the most boring thing ever invented)

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Make a sort of mini-game out of it, and let players deal with a heavily parsed genome. Want to adjust a plant's growth rate so that it can disable a moving tank? Just use your DNA-tron 8000 to bring up the "growth and development" section of its genetic code. Then you can run trial-and-error tests (or apply a commercial "patch") to get the desired effect.

Exactly. This frees you up to fool with stats, with most of RPG gamers want to do-- as opposed to reading a textbook.

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Original post by dink However, I think the subject matter is going to almost preclude this being anything but an indy project as it will not have mass appeal unless you can somehow design it to have heavy puzzle elements. I don't know how you would sell this to a publisher.

Unfortunately, the realities of publishing are so damned grim that I'm not even worrying about it anymore. Indie all the way baby! [lol] (I'm being silly, but I have some serious plans if I can even do half of this stuff)

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2. DNA, etc. - Sounds interesting. Also, plants hybridize. Could you make it simple enough to teach hybrid genetics in the process of playing and make this a fun game mechanic? Anyway, that is my suggestion for the mixing/alchemy thing. . . sort of cheat and make them all one "species" and allow hybridization between all of them and make different traits dominant and recessive and follow the rules of true genetics in your code.

Okay, I want to keep this simple, and I'm thinking some hashing routines at the code level could take care of producing new combinations. How much of a puzzle do you think this should be?

I could possible go the route of minigame, puzzle, or just a skill test.

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3. What is the goal? Am I gardening for fun or is there a competition? Am I making crazy kuzu vines to attack people?

You're helping to raise either a colony you establish or join. The colony is on Earth, which is nanotech and bandit plagued, or another planet you reach via wormholes. The planet can have a mix of hostile weather, monsters, or enemy towns and factions.

When you raise the colony to a certain level, depending on what it is, it starts spawning good and/or bad events (like stopping piracy, or starting wars with other towns). These events, in turn, alter the bigger gameworld as time passes.

Ultimately, you can change towns to follow the game's storyline (about human destiny) or accomplish freeform sandbox goals (like "take over territory X" or "restore Earth")

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4. Tending the plants - Excellent place to make a puzzle as tending plants in Harvest Moon became repetitive and not all that fun pretty fast. Harvest Moon was pretty fun, but you tended the farm for about half the day after getting going and then did the dating sim or the "adventure" for the remainder. I'd suggest making this a combination of strategy (how you set up the farm - how did you hybridize for hardiness or weakness, etc.) and puzzle (Connect the blocks to free up water, kill bugs etc.) or action (sort of Harvest Moon-ish but faster and more eventful - FIGHT the bugs off or time the pump for irrigation, etc.)

Wow! Okay, that's very cool. Alright, so maybe you treat a plot of land as a square. The square is sort of a puzzle that's influenced by the 8 squares around it.

The tending of a plot is a 2D holographic puzzle game made up of X by Y squares inside the square. These squares are tunnels, water blocks, nitrogen blocks, and enemy bug colonies, and a seed / plant stock square (circle).

At the start of the day, you look at all the squares, which have your plants in various levels of health & growth. You then drop in genetically modified insects that you've bought or made, who act like sort of RTS soldiers. Some are like lemmings, and will hunt for certain kinds of bugs / resources. Some are like little tanks or diggers you can control directly.

The enemy bugs and other threats keep coming and coming. You can sit there as long as you like fighting them, connecting roots, freeing water & other pockets (this is kind of like Dig Dug the RTS! o_O). Or, you can try to balance the bugs you add so that they work in harmony by themselves.

In different lands, there would be different bugs, harmful nanotech critters, etc. Since I was planning on a minigame for being a nanotech trouble-shooter / engineer anyway, maybe I could use the same minigame and swap out circuits and wires for bugs and roots.

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Original post by Kars Sied meyrs Alpha Centauri: The higher areas trapped more water. The trade winds were assumed to blow in one direction (i.e. left to right), so a mountin's left side would trap water and the area to the right of the mountain was dryer, even desert like if you had enough mountains. Think the Rocky mountains.

Thanks Kars, this is what I was thinking. If it could be done, you might be able to do some terracing, too.

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Plants grow better at certin elevations, i.e. you stop seeing trees above a certain altitude. Assuming different planets, the air pressuer is differnt at the same altitude. I.e. on a high gravity planet, the air presser as sea level may be too great for plants that grow at sea level hear on earth. Could make depressions to capture water and make wetlands.

I think if you add this in (especially on alien planets) it starts to become an environmental puzzle, which I think gardeners would enjoy (I'm not expecting hack & slashers to do this, only reap the benefits by assinging NPCs in town building).

There could also be the aspect of driving off larger critters, or building your enclosure so that they can't get your creations. (Or heck, maybe you engineer the plants to fight them off themselves).

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Nanotech can be more porsisly controlled but needs more instruction. I.e. you can send a signale that inactivates all/some of the nanites in an area, give them new instructions, etc. Nanites need to be manufactured (even if by other nanties). Nanites need to be programmed. Biotech is less controllable but can operate on its own. Breed two viruses in the hopes of getting what you want. Once you have released them, they can contnue to change and adapt to the world, possibly getting out of control.

Wow, I like this variation. Both are things you don't really see, but experience the effect of. Nanotech would be more powerful, able to operate in extreme environs, but eat up lots of processing power.

Biotech is fire and forget, cheaper, no processor required, but may mutate unexpectedly based on some hardiness stat. So one is more expensive, the other is more random, and maybe they both do the same thing but are specialists in different domains (biotech rules in the body, nanotech rules inside machines).

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Original post by Wavinator Most of us here probably won't find gardening interesting. But I suspect that's because of the gameplay and the result. If the gameplay ranged the traditionally gruesome to the "kind and fluffy," would it be more appealing? Does giving gardening more "cool" results make the gameplay more appealing?

I'm somewhat embarassed to admit that i've enjoyed the Harvest Moon games (somewhat of a farming sim).

Personally I think that some of your ideas sound interesting. The gruesome aspect might turn off some women gamers - which I suspect would be a larger audience for this type of game than many.

I also liked the city building in Dark Cloud 2 for the PS2 - though it was very limited, and how you built each city didn't have much affect on the game. If you were to combine the best elements of Harvest Moon and the Dark Cloud 2 citybuilding, i'd definately enjoy the game. However, my idea of this is something that would have to be done by an indie. I doubt there are very many large publishers that would show much interest.

I'm curious, how much of the game would be about gardening? Would it be the main focus, or would it just be a large part of the game or just something to do on the side?

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Original post by Will F I also liked the city building in Dark Cloud 2 for the PS2 - though it was very limited, and how you built each city didn't have much affect on the game.

Wow, can you tell me more any more about this? I've only see small town building via dialog choices in Morrowind. How did you build the city? What do you think they did right / wrong?

As far as the "gruesome" aspect (meh, I need a better word that means "appeals to hardcore gamer because of toughness"), I'm trying to find ways to really balance this. You start in a perfectly safe environment. I'd like to have some sort of violence switch that determines if you want the world to be sunny or more noir, like traditional RPG gamers seem to like. It's very challenging to balance this sort of thing, but one thing that could be done is to tone down enemies.

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I'm curious, how much of the game would be about gardening? Would it be the main focus, or would it just be a large part of the game or just something to do on the side?

This is hard to say because the game is freeform. Your only goal is to stay afloat financially, but how you do this is really open.

If you spent all your time gardening, and you were good at it you'd weather a lot of world changes and just grow rich over generations. But because the focus is RPG, there would be character interactions and changes in the game world to deal with on a periodic basis (chances to expand to other worlds, people who try to steal your crops, new markets that can be captured, etc.)

It's kinda funny, i've been thinking about trying to do something similiar to what you're describing. Though, right now all i've got are few pages of possible design ideas in a binder. Right now i've got a bunch of wouldn't that be neat ideas, but no overall direction to take the design (plus i've got another project i'm working on now that's taking up most of my dev time). I'm also not that sure that the ideas I have would turn out to be "fun" rather than just neat. Hopefully i'll keep working on it, and if I can ever get the design to the point i'm comfortable with, at least start on it.

Anyways...

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Original post by Wavinator Wow, can you tell me more any more about this? I've only see small town building via dialog choices in Morrowind. How did you build the city?

I probably couldn't do justice to describing the system so i'll quote from the gamespot.com review:

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The first Dark Cloud introduced the georama system, a world-building gameplay component that let you build and populate villages from the ground up. Dark Cloud 2 brings back and enhances the georama system, and this time it's a pivotal part of the gameplay, since you'll need it to literally rebuild the world. A huge assortment of buildings, small objects, plants, and landscape features are available so you can construct and mold a town to your liking. Georama gives you get a simple overhead interface for doing this, allowing you to move and rotate a piece before dropping it onto the terrain. You can even paint your buildings and add household effects like chimneys and fences. After you've built up a town, you can recruit the residents of Palm Brinks, the game's one existing town, to move into the houses you've created. Each new town you build has a set of requirements that, once fulfilled, will lead to the restoration of that area in the future. You can zip back and forth at will between the present and the future to see if the changes you've made have affected the timeline in a meaningful way. Generally, once you've fulfilled enough of the requirements, the people you've restored in the future will grant you assistance that will help further your quest. The georama system is pretty easy to get the hang of, especially with the game's comprehensive, elegant tutorial system, and you'll be building busy little burgs in no time.

Also, this page at ign and this page at gamespot (movie 15) have videos of the "georama system". I don't broadband where I am right now, so I haven't looked at the videos, hopefully they'll be useful.

Also here's some info from one of the game FAQs describing some things you'd typically have to do for each town.

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Workshop Elevator restored 10% Resident in house with Chimney 3rd Floor of Workshop restored 60 Culture Points obtained Gundorada Workshop restored 10% Workshop Elevator restored Borneo resides in Heim Rada Work Crane and Arm restored Generator placed Work Crane restored 10% Resident in house with Crane 3rd Floor of Workshop restored Windmill placed

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What do you think they did right / wrong?

The biggest problem with the city building is that there isn't all that much depth to it. The things you can do are mostly just cosmetic. There is a lot of customization you can do, like painting the houses, deciding what you want the layout to look like - but no matter what you do, as long as you meet the minimum guidelines for the city, it has no real effect on the game. The city always looks the same in the future, regardless of how you lay it out in the past.
Also, there's not really anything happening in the city in real-time, it's paused while you're building, and the only way to talk to the inhabitants is to go into the house you moved them into.

However, there was just something fun about the customization. I liked it despite the fact that it had little actual impact on gameplay.

Another neat thing was the way the game handled items. Your character has a camera that you can take pictures of things, then later you can take the pictures and combine them to give you inventions you can make - usually weapons and items.
IIRC there was a fire weapon that you could only make if you added a chimney to one of the houses, and then took a picture of the chimney.

One of the problems with Dark Cloud 2 is that they almost put too much into it, without enough focus on each element. For instance, there's the city building, golf, fishing, medals to collect, rare monsters to photograph, and a couple of other things - none of which are necessary to beat the game. They could all have used a bit more tuning to make them a bit better.