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Friday 8 February, 2008
GAMEPLAY
So by now its the 23 of Winter in my 2nd year, I've been playing a decent amount today. Winter is the dead month of the game, where you don't have to think about your crops and you can explore other adventures. Last winter I spent most of my time mining gems for money, but I decided that this year I want to take it easy. As usual, days begin with a checkup on my animals. I feed the chickens and take their eggs and then head to the barn to groom and milk the cows (and to groom and shear my two sheep as well). I've decided that I want to use this season to work on my standing in town and to expand my farm. My first task was to harvest enough lumber to expand my henhouse, I've been feeling like 4 chickens isn't enough and I want to take it up to the next level. So I spent the first week or so of winter harvesting all the wood I could find and eventually I had enough to upgrade my henhouse. As that was being built I spent most of my time fishing with my recently upgraded rod, and there were one or two days I headed to the mines. Mostly I'm taking it easy and planning for the planting months ahead.
I know a big part of the Harvest Moon games is getting married and starting a family, and it is something that I am trying very hard to do. I've had fleeting romantic encounters with a few girls in the town and I'm starting to piece together the way the whole romance mechanic works. Pretty much you just gotta show up in the right place at the right time on the right day of the week to activate the proper cut scene, and all of a sudden your a step closer to marriage. After a few weeks of stalking the girl I was interested in with no progress I got frustrated and turned to a online FAQ for answers. Apparently my house was not suitably upgraded for these particular ladies, my kitchen was lacking a full set of appliances and my bed wasn't big enough. According to internet wisdom, one must own a full set of furniture to even begin to impress the ladies, so my new goals were clear. Become the must fiscally attractive man in town, and seeing as I was the only one in town with free will, Im guessing my chances are pretty good. New priorities in tow I've continued to toil on the farm, now with the intention of impressing the ladies. Wish me luck!
DESIGN
I've been spending a great deal of time trying to decide why this game is so incredible. The short answer is: the freedom given to the player. The long answer is thus:
Harvest Moon: Friends of Mineral Town is a completely open-ended game. The game never ends, there are no defined objectives, the gameworld rules are rigidly defined by during gameplay the player can do whatever they want. This is a formula that could define an incredible game, but just because your game is open-ended it doesn't mean its incredible. Harvest Moon just does a lot of things right.
I think that the main reason I keep coming back to this game is because all of my goals and objectives have been set and chosen by me, not some programmer in Japan, which makes them a lot more personal and important. A very important aspect of gameplay is how quickly you get tired. It doesn't take much more then two hours of hard work to make you exhausted for the day (and while there are remedies they are time-consuming). This means that even as you are working you are gauging how much work you can get done that day, as well as what you will have to do over the next few days. Once the player has worked this out, all of a sudden the game has objectives and forward momentum. It is really up to the player to keep the game moving forward. It is incredibly difficult to design a fun game that makes the player do a significant amount of the mental labor involved in keeping the game going, but the genius of the game is that it really makes you think like a farmer.
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