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i said to somebody today that i spend a lot of time constructing these abstract concepts and twisting them around and adding and removing parts, until the concept has a certain quality like 'is a coherent whole'. but that's really subjective and arbitrary and i think the idea behind that is so if i work on a thing all its parts should flow naturally together without any points where i'm abruptly like "oh i have no clue how to relate this part to this other part", but maybe in practice that's unnecessary?
anyway i've still been thinking about side projects. i've been revising the farm game thing, like, "is this a thing i really want to do" "is this a thing i can realistically commit to doing" but i got SOME KIND of concept outlined:
moving to a frontier town that's at the edge of a mountain range that's actually a giant crater w/ a craggy rocky desert inside. but outside it's a boggy fen swampy kind of place, directly in the shade of the mountains, tho it gets more forest/plains-y a little ways out or in the foothills. ANYWAY. soon after you arrive you make a pact w/ some kinda forest god and that basically gives you the ability to level up.
also, yr pact provides you with a shrine or smth, and the deal is everything you grow in the area surrounding the shrine (to a pretty wide range) effects your stats + your health effects everything in the region. you can (a bit later on) make offerings to summon up the forest god and ask to expand or move yr fisher king zone.
ALSO so you live on the town outskirts and the town has a perpetual materials quest you can give to supply them w/ stuff to expand. or like a bunch of different quests, for different expansions. and sometimes you can pick where the things they build go -- somewhere between soulblazer and dark cloud 2.
ALSO the town is built over/through some ancient ruins, like super old and broken apart and plant-encrusted (i'm thinking the ruins of gehenna pale in jade cocoon, v. overgrown) and you can sometimes get into the depths which is where The Dungeon is.
alsooooo the gardening should be more like actual gardening, w/ a major emphasis on perennials and on yearly flux. stuff like "it's spring so the river is flooding the floodplain w/ silt" or "it's fall so the winds are drifting tons of wild pollens down from the mountains, so all this bare dirt is now wildflowers" or "it's summer so it's spawning season so the river is hopping w/ fish and they're blanketing the river banks". and planting, like, raspberry bushes like "in two years these are gonna be generating berries all over the place", rather than "in two weeks these will generate berries for another two weeks before wilting forever"
levels up: there are stats and skills. stats you raise by eating stuff; you have an xp bar alongside yr stamina or smth and it fills up in various colors based on the kinds of food you eat. when it maxes out the game rolls from everything in the bar and picks one actual stat gain to get. skills you level by doing actions in the domain of the skill (farming, forestry, mining, cooking, you know the drill). this is very haven and hearth inspired. skills are influenced both by their guiding stats and by the skill level itself, in different ways -- getting, say, strength and endurance (or w/e) up will make chopping down trees take less stamina, but it's yr forestry skill itself that determines the quality of the wood or wood products you harvest.
you may or may not be able to fuck the forest god. HOW OVERT ARE THE FETISH ELEMENTS GONNA BE, ASIDE FROM "U TF AS YOU LEVEL UP".
uhhh thinking like, primitive 3d, breath of fire 3 style (as usual) with world geometry and character sprites, tho maybe with a isometric camera that's edge-on instead of corner-on since that fits more with the farming sim genre conceit.
anyway i've still been thinking about side projects. i've been revising the farm game thing, like, "is this a thing i really want to do" "is this a thing i can realistically commit to doing" but i got SOME KIND of concept outlined:
moving to a frontier town that's at the edge of a mountain range that's actually a giant crater w/ a craggy rocky desert inside. but outside it's a boggy fen swampy kind of place, directly in the shade of the mountains, tho it gets more forest/plains-y a little ways out or in the foothills. ANYWAY. soon after you arrive you make a pact w/ some kinda forest god and that basically gives you the ability to level up.
also, yr pact provides you with a shrine or smth, and the deal is everything you grow in the area surrounding the shrine (to a pretty wide range) effects your stats + your health effects everything in the region. you can (a bit later on) make offerings to summon up the forest god and ask to expand or move yr fisher king zone.
ALSO so you live on the town outskirts and the town has a perpetual materials quest you can give to supply them w/ stuff to expand. or like a bunch of different quests, for different expansions. and sometimes you can pick where the things they build go -- somewhere between soulblazer and dark cloud 2.
ALSO the town is built over/through some ancient ruins, like super old and broken apart and plant-encrusted (i'm thinking the ruins of gehenna pale in jade cocoon, v. overgrown) and you can sometimes get into the depths which is where The Dungeon is.
alsooooo the gardening should be more like actual gardening, w/ a major emphasis on perennials and on yearly flux. stuff like "it's spring so the river is flooding the floodplain w/ silt" or "it's fall so the winds are drifting tons of wild pollens down from the mountains, so all this bare dirt is now wildflowers" or "it's summer so it's spawning season so the river is hopping w/ fish and they're blanketing the river banks". and planting, like, raspberry bushes like "in two years these are gonna be generating berries all over the place", rather than "in two weeks these will generate berries for another two weeks before wilting forever"
levels up: there are stats and skills. stats you raise by eating stuff; you have an xp bar alongside yr stamina or smth and it fills up in various colors based on the kinds of food you eat. when it maxes out the game rolls from everything in the bar and picks one actual stat gain to get. skills you level by doing actions in the domain of the skill (farming, forestry, mining, cooking, you know the drill). this is very haven and hearth inspired. skills are influenced both by their guiding stats and by the skill level itself, in different ways -- getting, say, strength and endurance (or w/e) up will make chopping down trees take less stamina, but it's yr forestry skill itself that determines the quality of the wood or wood products you harvest.
you may or may not be able to fuck the forest god. HOW OVERT ARE THE FETISH ELEMENTS GONNA BE, ASIDE FROM "U TF AS YOU LEVEL UP".
uhhh thinking like, primitive 3d, breath of fire 3 style (as usual) with world geometry and character sprites, tho maybe with a isometric camera that's edge-on instead of corner-on since that fits more with the farming sim genre conceit.
