Not to mention mining - I think I spent more time in Back To Nature mining that farming. But I agree that it does get boring - I don't think I ever made it through the full three years of the game, because it does lose its appeal once you've maxed out your tools and your house expansions. I was thinking maybe more random events to spice up the main activities, more visual variety (how come there are different color horses and chickens at the festivals but I can't have some?) and a higher percentage of story events, which would be aided by making the town more compact, putting the people where you run into them every day or two rather than way on the other side of town so it's too expensive to go there often.

What did you guys think about the cooking, was it fun or a waste of programming? I thought it would have been more fun to do this sort of direct creation to get your house expansions or try to breed interesting mutant animals/plants rather than something as irrelevant as cooking.

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Original post by sunandshadow What did you guys think about the cooking, was it fun or a waste of programming? I thought it would have been more fun to do this sort of direct creation to get your house expansions or try to breed interesting mutant animals/plants rather than something as irrelevant as cooking.

I don't remember the cooking; maybe I didn't get far enough in the game? Hang on, there was a cooking element in the Gamecube version, wasn't there? I never really used it, but I only got a couple of years in before lending the title away (I should probably get it back and try it out again).

Anyway, if the cooking wasn't too much of a hassle to use the recipes, and acted a bit like 'value-adding' to the produce, I think it would work quite well. If you're a talented cook, you could convert your produce into baked goods that sell for more (or impress the ladies a little bit better).

However, most of the cooking in console games seems to revolve around having exactly the right ingredients, with a pure binary success/fail motif. I'd like it better if you throw in extra ingredients for a unique taste (like adding fruit to a bread recipe to make fruit loaf). And there's a more analog result of cooking; burnt bread is still edible, but not high quality. You could make the result range through terrible/bad/average/good/great, and sell the cooked goods accordingly, based on chef skill.

I really liked the Back to Nature version of Harvest Moon. Though I hear the Wonderful Life is pretty nice (but I don't have a GameCube so I can't really play that one).

Anyway, with the Harvest Moon series I always wanted to get somebody to really help me out. In Back to Nature you could ask the little elves to help you, but they often did a poor job (they wander around aimlessly instead of daking direct routes and when they harvest things like eggs, wool, or milk they never use the yarn or cheese makers to increase the value of the things).

So, if you are making a Harvest Moon type game, it would really help if you added something like a farmhand to help out or let the wife help in some way.

Ideally with the farmhand the player can give them a set of tasks or instructions to do. Personally, I would have settled for an empty-headed NPC that required such detailed instruction that you practically wrote his AI.

Something like, you hire the local idiot who can only follow super-specific instructions that you write doen on his to-do list. So his list looks like this:

1. When it is 6:00AM, come to the farm.
2. Enter the Henhouse
3. If you see an egg then
4. Pick up the egg
5. Put the egg in the Egg Basket
6. If you see an egg, repeat from step 4
7. Exit the hen house


Or something, I mean, in Harvest Moon, I found it really fun to get the farm cleaned up and start producing, but I couldn't get a really big farm going because it's so darn boring doing the same old chores every day that writing code for the farmhand would at least be mentally challenging.

But anyway, getting a good farmhand from either a good AI or the ability to customise would be a big plus for a harvest moon style game.

Also, in Back to Nature. It would have been neat if each of the girls helped out in some way. Like Poupori helping water plants, Anne helping take care of the animals, Karen buying supplies from the stores etc... something that provides a gameplay bonus while staying in character to the world.

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Original post by Anonymous Poster How about Evil harvest Moon, where you have to fend off goblins from stealing your crops. You would never know when they might attack.

Sounds like The Horde. (edit: Erm, um, kind of)

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Original post by Brokenimage Personally, I thought it was really frustrating to have a very small vegetable-carrying capacity, which means you have to pick ~8 veggies, then walk ALL THE WAY BACK TO THE DROP OFF POINT

I started playing it way back before the SNES version was even translated to English. You could only carry one thing at a time!

The version I played was pretty RPGish. There were quite a few side quests. I seem to remember something about a monster to the north, but the rest is hazy. I personally played it all the way through. I think the farming genre has a lot of potential. No one has really pushed the idea very far.