HarvestRL - Success?

[AquaTsar17]

For this year's challenge I've decided to make a Harvest Moon-style game, with a typical roguelike twist. For those who have played the Rune Factory series of games, it will be similar but with greater randomness to the dungeons (and permadeath). You'll play as a farmer who needs to farm for supplies, to help keep the village alive and well, and clear some dungeons of enemies to finish the plot. After 3 days, I have a random village and surrounding grasslands, some unpopulated nearby dungeons, and basic functionality (movement, bumping to open and punch stuff, looking around, etc.).

Screenshots are below. I'll be blogging the development too here: http://gamesbyaqua.blogspot.ca and on the 7DRL Challenge site once I get access to it again.


Wandering around the village, just leaving the main road.


Looking at a door I closed behind me.

[AquaTsar17]

Progress Update (Now Day 5)

Day 4 was spent fixing the inventory and equipment system, and getting farming to work. You can now till soft soil, plant seeds in tilled soil, and use a watering can to keep the soil wet. Each day, the plants grow a little bit and the water dries up, requiring you to water the plants again. Right now alternative sources of water are not available (e.g., rivers or rain) but that's not hard to put in. I might do that on Day 6 if there's time.

There is a day-night cycle (how the plants grow) and seasons change, but there's no observable differences in these yet. Combat is also there, but rather basic and enemies don't have a good enough AI to fight back.

Today the plan is to expand the content. Add some more plants, enemies, populate the dungeons, and make the plants do something. I'll be adding villagers as well. This should continue into Day 6, so that by the end of Day 6 I'll have all the necessary content for the game to be finished. That gives me Day 7 to fix bugs, clean up the UI, and call it done. Even if I was to end the challenge tonight, I'd still call this a success. It's far more finished than my attempt last year, which didn't even get off the ground. More screenshots will come tonight, when there is something significantly different from the pics above.

[Faison]

Awesome! Honestly, HarvestRL was the first thought I had for 7DRL, but I decided I don't know my tech well enough yet to make it. So I'm really looking forward to your progress

[AquaTsar17]

Success! I think. The game is finished, and can be downloaded here. It isn't quite what I expected, and I'm pretty sure the balance is off, but I'm considering it acceptable. It's my first 7DRL that I finished (and only the second that I've attempted). Adjustments, improvements, and other stuff may come in the future but I'll probably fork those changes off into a new version.

[AquaTsar17]

It turns out my finished version actually had some major bugs in it. First, it was very common to end up in a game where you were unable to win, because the way out of the caves was never created. That's been fixed. Second, sometimes the items you needed to cure the villagers and defeat the final boss would spawn, but somewhere that was inaccessible. That's also been fixed. There were also a variety of minor bugs and UI problems (like not being able to see anything on the first turn, crashing the game by closing a door on a coyote, villagers eating the items you need to win, etc.). These have been fixed.

I went through and made some minor balance changes as well, but any more work that I do is likely for an expanded version of the game.

For those interested, you can find the original and revised versions here.

[AquaTsar17]

Well, my fixed version still had bugs preventing you from finishing the game. Those are now fixed, so the game is finally in a fully-playable state. The new version is available here for those interested.

I plan on improving the UI and game overall, but it will be a different project I think.

[Vanguard]

I finished this game.  It's really inconvenient to have no run feature with such a big map, and it's even worse because you only have 3 hp to start.  You can go from full to dead really fast while mashing the directional keys.

I liked figuring out how to grow plants and the different things that sacred fruit can be used for.  Obviously it's all really simple, but since the game doesn't hold the player's hand it took a little bit of experimentation, and that "aha!" moment was nice.

Throwing stones is tedious but OP, armor is insanely OP, and growing enough carrots to keep the village alive is just busywork.

[AquaTsar17]

Thanks for the comments! I agree that the game needs more work in several areas.

I don't plan to implement run (or auto-explore for that matter), but I do want an auto-travel (between important places) and "move-to" function (select a tile and move there). Neither run nor auto-explore would be needed if the maps weren't so huge, so I think shrinking the maps and making them more interesting is a better design decision. And mouse support... that would help a lot.

The farming is similar to how it's done in Harvest Moon, minus extra key presses, but I think it could be automated better. Perhaps you designate the area to water, plow, or harvest and your character just does it (similar to auto movement and such). That would allow you to spend more time making decisions with it, such as choosing what to plant. At the moment though, those choices aren't sufficiently interesting (even in Harvest Moon/Rune Factory they aren't particularly meaningful). Having food differ in terms of how much needs to be eaten, or having plants provide different benefits, would make the farming something more than a chore.

I wanted to keep limited HP so that combat was still interesting, but that definitely failed due to the way combat actually happens. I'll have to experiment more with this.