farm game w/ muscle growth and some light tf
also gay monsters & some gay humanoids
summary
plot sequences
the town
setting
magic
climate/seasons
skills
plants
materials/crafting
weird sex stuff
combat
graphics
interface
summary
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. there's a big river going along the mountain, w/ lots of little streams winding down the mountain to join it.
the place is just rife w/ forest spirits and nature gods. there are weird magic plants in the swamp, and the town is built over some ancient ruins that go down and down and down. there might be a warren of moon rabbits on the plains; there's definitely a bunch of weird monsters in the swamp.
yr gonna do some farming.
plot sequences
the intro of the game is like, a bit of a travel montage -- taking a train(?) at a more modern platform, getting off at a much sparser platform in the middle of nowhere, taking a carriage or smth out. the weather gets progressively worse as you continue. by the time you get close to town, it's this huge, once-a-century kinda storm, and lots of roads are washed out or blocked, and the village is battered and broken. everybody was holed up in the standing stone underworks. (the standing stones are surrounded by a mound and the mound itself is used as the granary etc, and it's on high ground in the prarie)
so the opening part of the game is essentially introducing you the location and to the town and the people in it by having you go around, collecting wood, fixing buildings, clearing debris, etc, with only a limited amount of 'free time' to do whatever. communal meals. this is basically the "introduction to the town" section. you get a bunch of quests like...
* gather some food from the swamp
* gather some food from the fen
* gather some food from the prarie
* cut down some trees on the swamp outskirts
* help people dredge up stone and drag it to the village for repairs
* help repair the town buildings
that basically give you reasons to head over to other sections of the map
after the major repairs are done, there's some kinda event with the village chief who's like "we've got enough stored wood left to make one more new house. yr a farmer, so, where do you want yr place to be?"
and the options are like...
- in the swamp
- extremely wet, brackish soil, good for growing gourds or melons in the fall, as well as rare swamp herbs; also allows for easy paddy farming
- up on the prarie
- good for growing tea bushes and dry grasses like wheat, but watch out for fires in the summer months
- stilt house on the fen, by the lake
- rich with wildflowers and bracken in summer and fall. there are thickets of berry bushes, but the soil is too wet and dense for trees to grow
- stilt hut near the floodplains
- rich soil for growing all sorts of things, but it all cycles around the yearly spring flooding. wild rice grows on the river shore
- in town
- for the sociable type. there's a flowerbed in the front and room for a garden in back. and you're close to everybody else!
- town outskirts, by the road out of town
- by the crossroads
this is basically the "pick a farm specialization" aspect. (they also say if you want a floodplain house yr gonna have to wait til summer, since the floodplain is currently: flooded)
depending on where you live and what you focus on, things branch apart some here. LIKELY you end up having some kinda contact w/ some kinda forest god, and that basically gives you the ability to level up (i think mechanically it's like a permanent 8x or 16x boost to yr gained xp, something like that)
actual 'plot stuff' is not really a high priority; getting stuff like villager routes, with dialog & progression info, fleshed out is much more important i think
the town
you live on the town outskirts, and the town has perpetual materials quests you can give to supply them w/ stuff to expand in various ways. sometimes you can pick where the things they build go -- somewhere between soulblazer and dark cloud 2.
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. there's a certain amount of dungeon crawling stuff but it's basically optional.
town upgrades are in two stages: "clear out this section of land", and then "build a thing on a cleared section of land". sections come in differently-sized chunks, and certain things can only be built on certain-sized plots. buildings you build yourself are more freeform in terms of size requirements.
baically the buildings work is that there's a "base", like, "wooden shack" "log house" "wood-and-daub house" "wooden house", etc etc etc. and then there are modifiers like "cellar" or "fireplace" or "storage hutch" or "porch" or "second floor" that you get to place in certain locations, which show up on the model. stuff like cellars and 2nd floors are fairly fixed, whereas smaller stuff has more wiggle room. (this is basically like dark cloud 2's house-placement.)
(buildings work like this: they have "damage" show up sometimes randomly, which you can fix for free by hitting them w/ a hammer. but they also have a hidden 'actual damage' stat, & when that hits certain levels it'll need actual materials to repair. there being unfixed visible damage drastically increases the rate at which the actual damage increases.)
actual characters:
* some lizardy/crocodillian monster who swings by after a few months like "oh hey i knew the old witch, sup, i could help pull the wagon to the human town if you want"
* giant swamp tentacle monster who keeps a hot springs going above/around him, warmed by his body heat. like the above-ground portion of his body is kinda a petrified tentacle that looks mostly like a giant tree? it's v. ornate, w/ like glowberries providing light in clusters, etc
* witch/alchemist who lives in a hut in the swamp and is More Magical than you
* presumably, two people in the town who kinda have not-a-thing going on, who you can date in a threesome
* MASC JOCK WHOS JEALOUS YR TURNING INTO A BUFF MONSTER
* big silver-haired blacksmith w/ a son in his mid-20s
* bachelor of the sciences who comes to town to research the glass mountain
* village elder
as the town expands, new characters show up. i think the way it would work is there's a fixed starting population, but the order in which characters show up is random.
setting
okay so this is a setting that i assembled as a sample universe for the myth generator, but i might as well use it for something.
in the beginning there was the fire god om-tsurr, who raged eternally. in the first age, it created a host of devas to praise it, and the devas created slave races -- ogres and titans -- to serve them. eventually the titans rose up and chained om-tsurr in binding cords, freezing the world. thus ended the first age.
in the second age, the titans build a vast and sprawling civilization across the web of binding chains, and delved into mystical secrets to they build new planes of existence. but eventually, their studies led them to break the binding of om-tsurr, releasing a cataclysm of elemental fire which consumed the entire universe and burnt for eternity before finally burning itself out. the only thing left of the universe was a vast and barren field of ash.
in the third age, the evaporated oceans reformed and rained down on the ash, and motes of pollen drifted down from the void. a new world grew, of shallow seas and vast archtrees. lesser races came from the wood or from the dirt, and spread out across the world.
so that's where we're at. the TONE OF THE SETTING is basically, expansion into new lands, everything is green and verdant, there isn't much systemic knowledge about what kinds of things exist or don't exist, so every time somebody stumbles across some weird creature-thing it's like "sure, why not have something like that exist". there are weird plant spirits everywhere; that's what most of the monster-creatures are.
(more relevantly to the setting: there aren't really mountains in this world, since it's an infinite plane of ash. the mountains nearby are from a crater impact, & the crater was some ancient flame deva. within the crater there's a desolate desert inhabited by orcs and trolls and balrogs and fire elementals, descended from some of the people of the first and second ages. likewise, the ruins that the town is built over are remnants from the first and/or second ages, & under the greenery they're clogged with old ash)
probably like...
O = potential house location
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ desert
^^^^^~~~~~~~~~~~~
.'^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ mountains
swamp ,.',`',`,.'.,.',
,'.,`'.,O,`'.` -- swamp house
O ,.,.'.' -- crossroad house
marsh ''' ------XX,`O., town -- fen house
road ---- | .,,'. river/swamp transition; bog/fen w/ river/lake
'' '' | O ~,.~ -- prarie house
| O~'~ -- floodplain house
prarie | ~~~
| ~~~ real big river
~~~~ | ~~~~~~~~~~~~
~~~~~~~~~~~~ ~~~~~~
probably forests down here
amazing ascii art i know
so there are some distinct locations here.
{THE TOWN}, plus some wildish outskirts that get expanded into as the town grows. the town is basically sitting right between the prarie and the fen, around where the ground dips lower to meet the water table. the eastern/lower section of the town probably has all the houses on stilts b/c of the water table. the town house is... on the fen side, i guess? w/ a boxed garden plot in the front, & a big backyard that can handle a vegetable plot + a beehive + a greenhouse + a chicken coop, tho maybe not all at once.
{THE ROAD} west of the town. it's a rocky dirt road.
{THE CROSSROADS} one of the potential house locations. it's the spooky one. it's dry, but without the growth to anchor the dirt to the ground. there's some howling winds & dust clouds that always seem to have something behind them.
{MARSH ROAD} further west of the crossroads.
{MARSH} a marsh. the path continues west for a ways, eventually going to a saltwater marsh on the sea. but it gets a lot less distinct, and thins/splits into animal paths mostly
{SOUTH ROAD} the proper road. it's roughly paved with stones, and is mounded up slightly (like a foot or two, i mean) over the prairie
{THE BRIDGE} over the big southern river. not sure what's past this.
{THE RIVER} usually flows to the west, emptying out in a big sandy bay/floodplain not too far south/southwest from the edge of the map. corals and stuff grow there. in the spring, the river levels rise considerably
{THE PRARIE} it's big and flat. mostly wild grasses w/ a few sparse trees. higher and drier than the rest of the region. the southern section, before the river, has some wild olive trees, but they're thorny and don't produce much fruit. maybe there's a moon rabbit warren (village) under the prarie? if moon rabbits go in
{SOUTH OF TOWN} the height change of the town grows into a bit of an escarpment, more distinctly delineating the prarie from the fen. this is where the path to the prarie house would go, along the escarpment and then west into the fields. there are two dungeon entrances, and the first is at the bottom of the escarpment, with a bit of ruined building lodged into the wall
{FEN LAKE} a big still lake just southeast of the town, but only like four feet deep save for in the middle. this drains southeast, becoming the river that floods. there are sometimes little fragments of ruins sticking out from the water, or curves of buildings visible in the lake.
{THE FLOODPLAINS} the river flows south/southwest, narrowing and picking up a bit of a current from the fen lake. except in the spring the flooding (from the river) makes it run backwards, into the fen. it's broad and mostly-flat, and pretty wet year-round. the plain is mostly on the west of the river; the eastern floodplain is narrower and more mixed into the fen itself, w/ brush and bushes sticking up above the inundation. the site of the floodplains house is tucked into the northwest section of the floodplains. there's wild deepwater rice that grows all along the river, more densely along the northern end, and its growth is naturally synced up to the flood cycle
{THE FEN} east of the town there's a big grassy fen. very squishy soil. lots of wildflowers (marshmallows, etc), rushes, berry bushes, ferns. a few big moss-encrusted boulders mostly-sunk into the ground. the fen house is set a ways back from the fen lake, on the northern side.
{SWAMP CUT} directly north & northwest of the town there's a section of the swamp that's being used for forestry -- there are some old stumps and a bunch of half-grown trees, packed pretty close together.
{SWAMP} north of the town the ground lowers in the shadow of the mountains, and the lull is filled with a huge swamp forest. the outskirts are p basic, but the depths get very weird and magical very quickly.
{SWAMP CLEARING} just inside the swamp, there's a bit of a clearing, about half of it actually solid ground. there are some primitive bridges (only slightly more advanced than planks) connecting it to the town, via a winding path. this is where the swamp house goes.
the ascii map is probably not to scale, at least in the sense that the swamp should be easily the largest area.
also tbqh some of that could/should get cut? this is an EXTREMELY LARGE region of space for a farming game, which usually have like... five main outdoor screens and maybe another ten small outdoor screens.
the mountain is actually called something like 'the high glass hill' or smth, to make clear 1. mountains are not a thing and 2. this thing isn't really a mountain either. it's like, black glass frozen in an outward splash.
there's some kinda tunnel under the mountain to get through. you get there through the dungeon, i guess
magic
yr pact with the forest god provides you with a shrine or smth, and you can perform various rites + keep the shrine maintained to give various growth buffs to yr land + yrself. it's like, different configurations of the shrine's immediate area change what rites are available. some of the rites have elements like "keep yrself ritually pure via bathing in springs" or "don't take damage" or w/e, so there's a constant component for as long as the rite keeps going. you can (a bit later on) make offerings to summon up the forest god and ask to expand or move yr rite zone.
a grab-bag of stuff that would affect yr rite potential:
* symmetrically placed markers or totems or resonators
* in specific shapes: squares or pentagrams or circles or w/e
* anti-symmetrically placed markers (/etc)
* specific magical plants
* weird stuff from the swamp depths
* any kind of non-magical plant
* fire pit / braziers
* pond/water feature
* relics from prior rites
a grab-bag of rites:
* some kinda stuff to purify the land (of what?) that requires some ritual purification of the pc
* to change the weather -- heat or cold or rain or whatever.
* to give you good luck
* to reveal hidden things, like other forest spirits
* some minor cosmetic stuff, like to make an everfull fountain or to add glowing orbs of light around yr farm
* ha ha marriage rites
climate/seasons
subtropical, w/ spring and fall as the rainy seasons and winter and summer as the dry seasons. there are EIGHT MONTHS a year, two for each season, and a little bracket of like, a week on each end that's a transition period (to represent flooding, leaves turning color, etc. uh like those kind of seasonal transitions should be everywhere, it's just especially dense during those two weeks a season. like, that's when out-of-season plants would wither/go dormant or stop producing for the year). so the year's calendar looks like this:
WINTER/SPRING TRANSITION | SUMMER/FALL TRANSITION
X X X X X X X -- spring starts | X X X X X X X -- fall starts
EARLY SPRING | EARLY FALL
X X X X X X X {river floods} | X X X X X X X
X X X X X X X | X X X X X X X
X X X X X X O spring equinox | X X X X X X O fall equinox
LATE SPRING | LATE FALL
X X X X X X X | X X X X X X X
X X X X X X X | X X X X X X X
X X X X X X X {flooding dimishes}| X X X X X X X { harvest festival }
SPRING/SUMMER TRANSITION | FALL/WINTER TRANSITION
X X X X X X X | X X X X X X X
X X X X X X X -- summer starts | X X X X X X X -- winter starts
EARLY SUMMER | EARLY WINTER
X X X X X X X | X X X X X X X { black eye visible in sky }
X X X X X X X | X X X X X X X
X X X X X X O summer solstice | X X X X X X O winter solstice
LATE SUMMER | LATE WINTER
X X X X X X X | X X X X X X X
X X X X X X X | X X X X X X X
X X X X X X X | X X X X X X X
SUMMER/FALL TRANSITION | X X X -- { empty days}
X X X X X X X | WINTER/SPRING TRANSITION
| X X X X X X X
* the day/night cycle changes with the seasons. not hugely, but some.
* in spring (like the entire spring) the river floods & leaves behind a big silty floodplain
* in summer the wind down off the mountain is thick w/ wild pollen, which pollinates a bunch of stuff
* also in summer: its hot and dry, and you'll actually have to water plants every few days / every day during a heat wave
* likewise: summer is brush fire season. not so much in the swamp, but definitely higher up on the plains
* in fall it's spawning season so the river is hopping w/ fish and they're blanketing the river banks
* in winter the snow extends down further from the tops of the mountains, and there might be a few frosts, generally in the morning & melting before too long. snow is possible but very rare
* huge luminous auroras in the winter. but. isometric camera. so...
it's not just those things; there should be a lot more seasonal tweaks
(it would be real neat if the seasonal calendar didn't line up perfectly with the actual months, and we had some days that were 'outside the calendar'. uh like i think the mayan calendar had some of that.)
the gardening should be more like actual gardening, w/ a major emphasis on perennials and on yearly flux.
any plant that is not completely uprooted to harvest will keep living & growing out of season. stuff like berry bushes would take two+ years to even start bearing more than one or two berries; stuff like tomato plants could bear on the first year but it would take five+ before they reach full maturity. or w/e, specific times aren't clear yet, just: a lot of stuff yr gonna plant and tend to for a long time before it bears any fruit.
skills
you level yr skills by doing actions in the domain of the skill (farming, forestry, mining, cooking, you know the drill).
there are special one-use items you can collect in various places through various ways that raise yr max stamina & health
when you level up certain categories of skills, you get a MUSCLE GROWTH TF:
* gardening, harvesting, refining: you get buffer
* magic: glowing veins (that spread & glow brighter as you rank up)
(there's no animal tf)
also you tf (gradually in minor ways) as a side-effect of performing certain rites
(certain actions are 'prolonged' and don't just happen in a crafting menu or w/e. instead yr character queues up the actions and performs them. most cooking actions are like this. idk about this, b/c it would basically be "this thing has a hugely long animation".)
skills:
gardening
- foraging
- use: wild plant identification; increased foraging yields; decreased stamina cost of harvesting
- gain: harvesting wild plants & berries
- farming
- use: increased plant care info; higher quality grown plant harvests; decreased stamina cost of planting, tending, and harvesting
- gain: planting crops; tending to sprouts; harvesting from a plant you planted yrself
- cooking
- use: increased quality cooking products; more visible recipes; decreased stamina cost of cooking
- gain: prolonged food preparation; food processing actions (cheese aging, wine aging, milling, etc)
harvesting
- mining
- use: rock identification; increased mining yields; decreased stamina cost of mining
- gain: digging holes, mining rock, and collecting underground scavenge materials (e.g., crystal growths)
- woodcutting
- use: increased woodcutting yield; decreased stamina cost of woodcutting
- gain: chopping trees; stripping trees for materials
animals
- fishing
- use: increased fish info / quality; decreased stamina cost of fishing; better fishing meter?? is there a fishing minigame??
- gain: catching fish & collecting from nets / fish traps
- animal care
- use: increased animal info (diet, likes/dislikes); increased animal good quality; decreased stamina cost of animal care
- gain: feeding animals; animal good extraction action (milk, wool, honey)
- trade
- use: increased trade quality
- gain: trading with other characters (& monsters)
refining
construction
use: decreased repair costs; increased building weathering (less visible damage); decreased stamina cost of construction actions
gain: building any structure
crafts
use: increased crafted item quality; decreased stamina cost of crafting actions
gain: any prolonged crafting action (throwing a pot, weaving); any refining action (firing clay, cutting boards, chiseling blocks, cutting gems, etc)
magic
crystallography
use: increased grown crystal yield
gain: harvesting grown crystals
alchemy
use: increased alchemy ingredient info; higher quality potions
gain: making potions; any prolonged alchemy action
spellcasting
use: increased spell effects; stronger rite effects
gain: casting spells; casting rites; performing recurrent rite requirements
plants
many of these plants are crop plants, but a lot of them would just be wild growth without any particular use. they'd still grow and die and pollinate and spread.
plants have a soil requirement (sandy soil, silty soil, etc) and a water requirement (swampy soil or irrigation, good drainage, etc), and a (hidden) finickyiness value, which determines the penalty for growing outside of their preferred environment. so certain locations are better to grow certain plants, and certain plants can _only_ be grown in their preferred environment.
plants have a few requirements: water, drainage, light, and soil, with error bars for each to determine their tolerance. plus, they all have seasonal growth/flowering/fruiting cycles, which determine when they should be planted and under what conditions they flower and can be harvested.
mechanically, plant growth would work like this: during the day, there's a running tally of water/light/drainage/soil values. daily, staggered for each plant, the tally is converted into the plant's growth state, and sprites/etc are updated.
for simple crops this is an accumulated growth number + a current health value + a tag set like 'wilted', 'spindly', 'lush', 'flowering' or w/e, and is specified by comparing the daily totals to the ideal totals, adding growth, increasing or decreasing health, and optionally setting/removing one or more tags.
i think flowering plants would have separate flowering & pollination values.
crops can be harvested once their growth number reaches a certain value.
fruiting crops would use variations on a template structure, that would go into 'flowering' state on a certain trigger, and start incrementing their flowering value, leave 'flowering' state on a certain trigger, and then start growing fruit based on its pollination value.
the archetypal Basic Crop Plant, as seen in all other basic farming games, would be like...
type Days = Int
type GrowthFunc = Int -> Int -> Int -> Int -> Soil -> GrowthData
data GrowthData = GrowthData
{ overall :: Int
, water :: Int
, drainage :: Int
, light :: Int
, temperature :: Int
, soil :: Int
}
type PlantFunc = Plant -> (Int, Int, Int, Int, Soil) -> Plant
data Plant
= DeadPlant
| GrowingPlant
{ days :: Int
, growth :: Int
, health :: Int
}
| FinishedPlant
{ yield :: Int
}
basicPlant :: GrowthFunc -> Days -> PlantFunc
basicPlant growthFunc maxGrowth =
\plant envData -> case plant of
GrowingPlant days growth health ->
if (health <= 0)
then DeadPlant
else if (growth >= maxGrowth)
then FinishedPlant 1
else let
result = growthFunc envData
temp = case overall result of
x | x < 0 -> GrowingPlant (days + 1) (growth + result) (health + x)
| x > 5 && health < 5 -> GrowingPlant (days + 1) (growth + result) (health + 1)
| x > 10 && health < 10 -> GrowingPlant (days + 1) (growth + result) (health + 1)
| otherwise -> GrowingPlant (days + 1) (growth + result) health
in case temp of
GrowingPlant x y z | z < 0 -> DeadPlant
x -> x
p -> p
some something where:
* if the plant is done growing, it has a single, qualityless yield
* health is lost on poor growing days
* health is regained back up to the base health on decent growing days
* bonus health is gained on good growing days
* the plant dies if it runs out of health
i don't know if any of the planned crops would actually be that simple, though
the result of a growthfunc would be 1-10 for 'normal growth', 0 for some kind of stunting condition, and in the negatives for harm (which is directly added to health, so can very rapidly/instantly kill a plant)
and then there would be a generic growthfunc function, that just takes ideal/tolerance pairs for each of the numeric values + a soil tolerance map. like uh..
defaultGrowthFunc
:: (Int, Int, Float)
-> (Int, Int, Float)
-> (Int, Int, Float)
-> (Int, Int, Float)
-> (Soil -> Int, Float)
-> GrowthFunc
defaultGrowthFunc
(idealWater, waterRange, waterWeight)
(idealDrainage, drainageRange, drainageWeight)
(idealLight, lightRange, lightWeight)
(idealTemp, tempRange, tempWeight)
(soilMap, soilWeight) =
\water drainage light temp soil =
let
waterVal = fit idealWater waterRange water
drainageVal = fit idealDrainage drainageRange drainage
lightVal = fit idealLight lightRange light
tempVal = fit idealTemp tempRange temp
soilVal = soilMap soil
total = round $
sum
[ fromIntegral waterVal * waterWeight
, fromIntegral drainageVal * drainageWeight
, fromIntegral lightVal * lightWeight
, fromIntegral tempVal * tempWeight
, fromIntegral soilVal * soilWeight
]
/ sum [waterWeight, drainageWeight, lightWeight, tempWeight, soilWeight]
in
GrowthData
total
waterVal
drainageVal
lightVal
tempVal
soilVal
where -- this function is actually super wrong. we want max value when target == val, decreasing (linearly?) on either side until it hits negatives when target + range == val or target - range == val. and, because the results would depend on the range, we'd want to normalize it too. but, this entire approach introduces the problem of, if positive values are good and negative values are bad, not being able to distinguish too much vs. not enough
fit :: Int -> Int -> Int -> Int
fit target range val = abs (val - target) - range
(a basic harvest-moon style plant would then have a growth function that returns 1 growth if watered, 0 growth otherwise, and -10 growth out of season, and that's it.)
(i guess when a plant is planted from seed, it doesn't run the growth func for the partial day; it only starts when it has a full day of resources to use.)
(this system is superrrr simple and nothing like what i have ultimately planned, but it has the extreme benefit of 1. having a simple, concrete implementation and 2. still being more involved than generic harvest-moon style plants.)
i think most plants would also have a 'dormancy' state, where its health hits critical levels and it then withers up and slowly spends accumulated growth (w/ the value depending on the negative growth result) until its growth function starts returning more favorable values. if its accumulated growth runs out, then it dies. so like, rhizomes or root colonies or w/e. garlic wilting and dying down to a bulb in the winter, only to regrow again. lilypad rhizomes under the swamp. but that might require... basically distinguishing between "energy" and "growth". energy is produced/stored based on the level of growth, and energy is spent to increase growth and prolong dormancy. dormancy can only be entered and maintained under certain conditions. something like that. so things like "whoops watering this plant forced it out of dormancy so now it's gonna actually die b/c it's out of season".
this could be made more complicated in lots of ways:
* increased yield based on health value
* have a yield quality that's based on health value
* have a yield quality that's based on pc farming skill
* use other result values. 'overall' would be a weighed average, but there would be e.g., .water, .drainage, .light etc that correspond to individual metrics, and you could use those to allow for bad statuses (e.g., overwatered, underwatered, too much light, not enough light, as distinct from general 'bad health')
* have a growing plant not dead-end at a static yield, but instead produce yield and then continue growing or reset growth to a prior stage
* a flowering plant!!
* a plant with differing requirements at different stages of its life (e.g., deepwater rice, which is grown on ground and then flooded for the rest of its growth)
* figure out how to introduce data like "things growing under this plant have decreased light values"
you can plant seeds at any time in any soil, and what would happen is that the seed would... basically retry growth every day until it gets a positive value, or until a year has passed. to simulate delayed germination. randomly scattered seeds in fall and then hey in the spring there are a lot of new plants growing there. basically a plant can't die until it's growing.
(pollinators would go around and randomly increment the pollination value of suitable flowering plants with a flowering value above a certain level (i.e., past 'budding'). crop data would include suitable-pollinator info, like bee/wasp/butterfly/bat, and any animal in that category could do the pollination.)
(pollinators would be a whole other thing -- they would get a boost for all the pollination they get to do, and so they might mostly be pollinating non-crop plants like clovers)
(also storms and frosts could strip the flowering tag off of plants. or increment it all the way to 'wilted' or 'bare')
(the goal of this is to get things like winter plums, where to fruit in late spring they need to bloom in late winter/early spring and have their blooms last long enough to get pollinated.)
(there might be a few plants like, idk, plum trees, where to fruit in the spring they need to have the flowers last in the winter long enough to get pollinated, which would depend on the weather around the flowering time + the number of nearby pollinators. see also: figs. but this would not be a concern for MOST plants.)
* water:
[none, scarce (only during heatwaves), some, (every 2/4 days), lots (daily), constantly (2x a day)]
planting in the swamp provides 'constant' level water
planting in the fen provides 'lots' level water
* drainage: [poor, mid, good, excellent]
how well the plant deals with standing water. a combination of constant watering but requiring excellent drainage would be very tricky, since you couldn't just plant it in the swamp.
swamp has poor drainage
fen has poor drainage
prarie has good drainage
town has mid drainage
floodplain has mid drainage
desert has excellent drainage
* light:
[full shade (no direct sunlight), partial shade (3-6hrs/day, pref. morning/evening), partial sun (3-6hrs/day, pref. midday), full sun (6hrs/day)]
location matters, & there should be shadow calculations (not necessarily 100% realistic) for day/night cycles + seasonal variations. mechanically, "light" is recieved by plants during the day, with the amount of "light" varying based on the time of day -- midday sun counts for more than evening sun. there are other sources of "light", like fires or glowing plants or w/e, but they're generally tiny compared to sunlight
* soil: [sand, silt, clay, loam, peat]
swamp is mostly silt and clay
fen is mostly loam and peat
prarie is mostly loam and silt
town is mostly clay and loam
floodplain is mostly silt and sand
desert is nearly entirely sand
* temperature: this is nearly wholly seasonal, with some slight microclimates in certain sections. each season is basically flat, temperature wise, with a slight dip in the days during/immediately after rainstorms. the two transition weeks are when the temperature slides from one season's level to the next's, and PRESUMABLY that temperature change would trigger things like leaves dropping and that kind of variation.
plant | water | drainage | light | soil |
mushrooms | none | poor | little | any non-sand |
sunflowers | some | mid | full sun | loam |
pumpkin | constantly | poor | partial sun | silt, loam |
raspberry | some | poor | partial sun | loam, peat |
wheat | scarce | good | full sun | loam |
garlic | some | mid | full sun | loam |
grapes | lots | good | partial sun | loam, silt |
cactus | none | excellent | full sun | sand |
deepwater rice | constantly | extremely poor | full sun | loam, silt |
etc, with more realistic plant datas. presumably these would actually take the form of numbers, with an error bar for each value for each plant.
things you'll be doing to tend to plants:
* pulling weeds
* watering directly
* filling irrigation tanks
* turning irrigation valves on or off
* picking off pests
* trimming flowers or stray limbs (apple trees to get branching limbs, garlic to focus growth on the bulbs, etc)
* staking and encouraging growth onto supports
* generally maintaining the environment around them
but sometimes it would be: nothing! just gotta wait for plants to do their thing, and try to fix it if there's adverse conditions like a huge storm or a bunch of bugs or w/e.
unsorted:
sunflowers
chickpea
radish
tomato
pepper
rhubarb
various mushrooms
waterlilies
cattails
marshmallows
endive
tubers: (well, stuff that grows underground)
garlic
onion
tuber sunflowers
yam
carrot
peanuts
reeds/grasses:
sugarcane
rice
rushes
wheat
corn
bamboo
sorghum
bushes:
lavender
thyme
sage
rosemary
rooibos
honeybush
raspberry
blackberry
tea
trees:
olive trees (takes like 10yrs for a tree to start growing fruit, but there are lots of wild trees around)
fig trees (needs wasps to fruit!!)
pear trees
strawberry tree (fruits in fall)
lemon
lime
orange
apricots
vines:
cucumber
olive
sweet pea
calabash (squash)
hemp
poison ivy
beans
soybeans
melons
there should also be some more magical, fantasy plants.
materials/crafting
from plants
* grain (can be ground to flour)
* plant fibre (can be woven to coarse twine)
* sticks (from saplings, or dead wood, or cutting down a tree)
(+ twine = basket)
* logs (from cutting down a tree)
* resin sap (collected from certain trees)
* sugary sap (collected from certain trees)
from minerals
* rocks
* flint
* clay (found under soil / dredged from swamp, in random deposits)
* sand (found as soil / dredged from swamp, in random deposits)
* peat
* loam
* silt
processed
* bricks / shingles (clay + furnace)
* shaped pot (clay)
-- in various styles. cord-wrapped etc
* shaped dish (clay)
-- in various styles
* clay pot (shaped pot + furnace, chance of shattering)
* earthenware dishes/vessels (clay + furnace, chance of shattering)
* glazed clay pot / glazed earthenware (shaped thing + glaze + furnace)
* chopped wood (logs)
* charcoal (chopped wood + furnace)
* ash (general byproduct of cooking fires or furnaces; rice or straw can also be used)
-- different kinds of wood/plant material yields different ash which has different visual character
* green glass/brown glass (sand + furnace)
* ash glaze (ash + water, ash + clay)
* turpentine (resin sap + furnace)
* syrup (sugary sap + furnace)
* laquered wood (wood + resin sap/shellac)
* varnish (resin sap + turpentine)
* dyes
from plants: roots, berries, bark, leaves, mushrooms, lichens
from dirt: ochre, sienna, umber
from animals: bugs
animal products:
* bone (harvested from hunts or from scavenging)
* antler/horn (harvested from hunts or from scavenging)
* fur/pelts
* shellac (from bugs on certain plants)
* silk?
* meat
* milk?
buildings/constructions
* trellis (wood and twine)
* wooden trellis (wood x2)
* wooden archway (wood x2)
* millstone (stone)
* furnace (stone, clay)
* shelf (wood)
* bench (wood)
* fence (wood or stone)
* flower pots / containers / window boxes (wood or clay)
* greenhouse
probably beyond yr ability to make wholly by yrself
weird sex stuff
honestly i'm kinda up in the air about how much Sex would go into this, beyond the more-or-less standard 'dating sim aspect', and like, heavy porn influences would maybe erode the sense of the world?. so take all of this with a grain of salt.
probably some of the rites are ritual sex. ritual sex w/ the forest god or weird forest monsters even.
so other characters would worship or have pacts w/ other forest gods. if u get married they gotta get fucked by yr forest god and u gotta get fucked by their forest god. thats how marriage works right.
for an example of what i mean by 'erode the sense of the world', like okay sure you can fuck around w/ the big silver-haired blacksmith and you can also fuck around w/ his son and hey maybe you can have a threesome. except. outside of a porn lens thats actually pretty gross to have ambiently existing in the town.
combat
is yr standard action/rpg fare: everything is moving, enemies can either run into you or do a specific attack (cast fireball, swing sword) to deal damage. hp is distinct from stamina, and only shows up when 1. yr in the dungeon 2. there's an enemy in the same room or 3. it's not at max.
you have equipment:
* weapon (probably just swords)
* chestpiece
* gauntlets
* pants
* boots
* four ring slots
it would be nice if equipment changed yr character sprite, but all armor in all poses for all possible pc tfs sounds completely impossible.
the vast majority of equipment is just a +defense bonus. rings have other kinds of boosts
there's a dungeon under the town, which goes down like 100 floors. it's a pretty basic roguelike generation algo & regenerates every time you leave. mostly the stuff you get in there is gear for more dungeon crawling, but there are some rare mats or herbs or w/e that you can only get from there.
(there are also sometimes beasts in the swamp, but they're fairly rare. most of the things in the swamp are monsters you can talk to.)
graphics
uhhh thinking like, primitive 3d, breath of fire 3 style (as usual) with world geometry and character sprites. pc sprites would be like... either 4-angle or 8-angle, and the camera would be i think an edge-on isometric camera, that rotates in either 90-degree or 45-degree increments, depending on how many angles we go with. (basically: edge-on camera makes sense for a farming sim, but corner-on looks a bit better. but it would look worse if there aren't the complete set of facing sprites, so if we don't have those then it wouldn't be allowed)
-- if there's substantial player tf, 3d models might be better for characters? i mean, 3d models are tough to do in a way that looks lo-fi but also GOOD, is the problem. also 3d models are entirely beyond my ability to do on my own.
interface
interaction is like...
* Interact With Environmental Object (talk, open)
* Use Held Object (plow, water, plant seed)
* Jump(?)
dropped items are picked up automatically when you're nearby. certain larger items (constructions like a furnace or a fence or w/e) can be picked up and carried overhead, at the cost of drastically reduced speed.
the environment would be blocky. or... made with 3d tiles, with ground slopes but also cliffs.
you automatically step up things that are a half-height taller; you step up with a pause things that are a height taller, and you can mantle + climb up things that are 1.5 and 2 height taller. you jump one height, and can mantle while jumping. (this is basically vagrant story controls. jumping/mantling might end up being completely pointless and cut.)
there aren't distinct "rooms": the camera sticks to the player, and at the edge of certain 'zones' it does lock to an edge, but once you get within 2-3 'tiles' to a path to another zone it snaps back to being centered on the pc and only reverts to zone-edge when you pass through (or back) to being inside a zone. so basically seamless transitions, but with some camera trickery to ADHERE TO GENRE CONVENTION. also expanding the town would change its zone bounds
(all the maps will be hand-made, except for dungeon floors, which would be one big zone probably.)
there's a little ui element in the top-right corner that's a little circular blurb of what the sky looks like right now: sun in the center in midday, moving to edges at sunset, moon coming up around sundown in the proper phase, etc. it's cloudy when there are clouds. you can buy a clock that adds a curved bar around the thing to represent the day/night cycle + a pointer for the current time.
you don't HAVE to sleep at night, but... maybe after x hours up, you get a 'tired' condition that drains yr stamina constantly, and if it hits zero you pass out. coffee gets rid of it for a while. likewise, when you sleep you don't necessarily wake up at 6:00am or w/e; it's more that as you sleep yr energy refills, and you sleep until the next 'wakepoint' after yr energy is maxed out. OR when an event happens (chickens crowing, knock on door, brilliant thunderclap, metor crash, etc etc).