Weekend Design Challenge: Farming
No, this isn't a gold farming post. That comes later this week.
I got Rune Factory for the DS for Christmas. This is a fantasy version of the Harvest Moon games. These games are built around the rather interesting premise of farming. You wouldn't think it would be compelling gameplay, but it turns out to be really interesting.
The challenge this week is to taking an unusual topic, like farming, and make a compelling game (or mini-game in an RPG) out of it.
The newest game adds a lot of fantasy and RPG elements. After a hard day of farming, you can go go slay monsters in different caves. What's interesting is that you can also farm patches of dirt in the caves. This helps you because when the crops are ready to be harvested they produce powerups that give you more stamina.
What's interesting is that the activities in the game are rather repetitive if you look at the game clinically, but it's still rather fun. Once again, I think this points out that the "grind" in most online games isn't because the activities are repetitive. Many other fun games also have mechanics that are more repetitive than anything an MMO has to offer. I think the larger issue is that the activity is repeated over a long period of time, which burns people out.
So, what is your idea for a game that takes a non-traditional activity and makes a game out of it?
RSS feed for comments on this post.
TrackBack URI: http://psychochild.org/wp-trackback.php?p=365
Here's an idea that's been in my mind for some time.
While crafting could be considered a traditional activity, why not push it a little further. Here comes CraftQuest!
Come in this world and provide the greatest warriors, magicians and such with the best gears! Available class: crafter. All other classes are controlled by AI.
Try to be the unique provider of the Flaming Swords, the greatest NPC guild on the server.
There's rumors that the Dead Kitties guild will be raiding the Black Evil Dungeon next week so they will need tons and tons of healing potions.
And lately, an ancient artefact has been found in Silent Mountain. Maybe you should go there and mine a little in the hope to find your share too. Of course, you might need to recruit some bodyguards to protect you because well, you just can't fight!
Comment by Over00 — 31 December, 2007 @ 9:38 AM
I think the key to any fun system is abstracting a spatial, arcade, or strategy experience into a tileset that humans fine innately enjoyable. I firmly believe that the farming tileset works because people can intuitively understand that a turnip is a valuable possession; we like food.
I'd love to be able to link to my ongoing project where you are a construction company dispatcher, but it remains only 75% finished. The idea is, you have a handful of employees, and a handful of jobs, and you have to distribute the employees as efficiently as possible. Finishing jobs earns cash, which pays employees and serves as a score. Anyway, it's a pretty weird tileset, but the gameplay is ultimately about juggling numbers.
One of these days, I'll have a link to back up my talk!
Comment by Bret — 31 December, 2007 @ 10:01 PM
Over00, I had the same idea before - "Item Shop Tycoon". It seems that some Japanese guys recently beat both of us to it though: http://www.insertcredit.com/archives/001807.html
I think spatial experiences are easy to abstract because we already know good ways of representing and abstracting space in an intuitive manner, whereas e.g. emotional experiences are more difficult to abstract because our best ways of representing them (via bar gauges, etc) kind of fall short. At best we can represent the hormonal balance of a creature, but anything more complicated is a nontrivial problem. Further, it's pretty tough to provide feedback to the player on a character's emotional state without resorting to the same dreadful graphs - you can do facial animation but that only works for a subset of emotions.
That being said, the easiest way to get gamers' attention seems to be to appeal to basic survival instincts. Games about combat connect with our lizard-brain at a pretty deep level, even if they're complex hex-and-counter wargames, because the goals of "smack bad things" are easy to follow. So we have smack-bad-things (combat games), get-food (tycoon games and management sims), and reproduce (dating sims, relationship games, and of course porn games). Notably, games like Civilization and, surprisingly, Rune Factory combine all these imperatives. The challenge then becomes whether or not to stay within those boundaries, or to try and push out.
I'll go out on a limb and say, perhaps a sculpting game would be interesting. The controls would be pretty simple: select one or another kind of chisel, rotate the block of stone, aim the chisel, then hammer at it with varying degrees of strength. You're given a model to follow, and you have a time limit. When the time is up, you're rated based on how closely you managed to match the model. There might also be a free-sculpting mode, or a no-time-limit mode.
The challenge on the design side would be to balance the game so it's fast (difficult given the subject matter) and fun, while not reducing it to a rote paint-by-numbers exercise. Clearly, skill would play a pretty big part in this game, but the basic skills are quite intuitively understandable.
As part of an MMO, this could be pretty cool - the developers could organize "coolest sculpture" contests with the winner's submission appearing as a decoration in a public area. Or, if there's player-built housing, players could use the sculptures as home decor. (Of course, you can be sure that there will always be wonderful people who make sculptures of sports cars, human genitalia, etc...)
Comment by n.n — 1 January, 2008 @ 5:22 PM
n. n. - You just described A Tale in the Desert's tool-forging system. And you are correct, it was extremely interesting. It was how I made my money in-game.
When they added the glass-blowing system, that's when I had to admit defeat. Imagine something similar to what you described, but instead of using different paintbrushes, if you will, to freely sculpt a shape, you were simply moving and rotating a glass rod inside a furnace. Any part of the rod that heated up sufficiently would sag. You had to manipulate the sagging process in order to match a given shape. The closeness of the match determined the quality of your jar, distiller, bong, etc.
Strangely, I came back to this thread to mention Guitar Hero. What primal human desire would we say that satisfies? It seems to me to be an entirely original and very popular genre.
Comment by Bret — 2 January, 2008 @ 10:37 PM
Bret, I had no idea the tool system in ATITD afforded that level of detail to the player. That's pretty cool - if I recall correctly, I downloaded the trial for ATITD but somehow never got around to it. The whole complex social structure thing kind of intimidated me.
As for Guitar Hero, DDR, Ouendan and other rhythm games, that's really an excellent question. Initially I was going to say "that's music - it's culture; it's what people do after all their primal desires have been dealt with." Then I thought about Maslow's Hierarchy - which is another useful way of thinking about what drives people in general and gamers in particular.
But all this is missing one essential point, which is that the urge to dance and make music seems to be somehow instinctual in human beings. If you think about your stereotyped tribal society, no matter where in the world they happen to be, one of the first images that comes to mind is this bunch of people playing drums and dancing around a fire. Rhythm games speak to that instinct. I'm not sure where exactly it fits in the above schema, but it seems to me to be somewhere in that liminal area between primal desires and culture.
Comment by n.n — 3 January, 2008 @ 4:48 PM
I had a post that seems to have vanished, let's try this again...
Funny to see farming mentioned. I recently played the 24 hour trial of A Tail In The Desert (ATITD), and really enjoyed the bit of farming I was able to do. I also have been playing the trial of Lord Of The Rings Online (LOTRO) which also has a farming component - and I must say I really enjoyed them both.
So thinking about how to put farming into a game, three thoughts: minigames, the time frame farming takes, and what the real world motivations are for farming (and gardening).
First, the time frame. It seems like soil in most games is infused with Miracle Grow as most crops grow to maturity in a matter of a minute or so. That's not bad in some ways, but it just perpetuates the whole "grind" type of gameplay IMO. I sat in LOTRO the other day growing and planting onions for about 30 minutes to level up my farming skills. Entertaining at first, boring later. Why can't there be options for long term farming? More on that later in the "design" part of the post.
Second the minigames. I really like how farming works in ATITD. It involves a certain amount of minigame interaction as after you plant seeds (Flax at least) you have to weed the crop now and then to get it to mature. You'll see the weeds come up and have to click them to remove them. It's not just a "watch the progress bar slide" type of interaction which is nice.
Third, why people farm/garden in real life. For aesthetics (making a nice garden), for personal food (vegetable garden) and for (hopefully) profit (large scale farming). As far as I know, none of the games really work this way.
So on to design. What I'd like to see is a farming system with some element of minigames to make it more interactive at times, options for longer term farm projects, and options for farming/gardening that fit what real life was.
Time Frame
Keep some kind of short term quicky-grow options for some kinds of game play. Perhaps things like crossbreeding plants, trying out small patches of crops to test soils or combinations of fertilizers and such. But also, enable long term farming. Long term as in crops that take an hour, or a day or maybe even a week for something really special. And most importantly, do not require the player to constantly attend to the crops for that time period. What comes to mind is the skill training system in Eve Online - where some skills take vast amounts of real world time to complete, but require no in-game time commitment.
Why have long term growing options? First to allow more casual gameplay where players can do things and have a certain amount of game progress without always being logged in. Imagine planting a flower garden and logging back in in a week and see it it done - or planting a whole field of some food crop that takes a week to grow, but if harvested at the end produces a BIG profit for you. Or grow that one special plant who's extracts are used for a high level enchantment. The plant can only grow on the top of tall mountains and takes a day to mature.
Of course there have to be risks with long term plantings, but not ones that require you to always be logging in to get your crops to mature. Things like weather, pests and mauraders should threaten your crops (PvF even!), however you should be able to counteract the threats with protections. Scarecrows for example, or frost resistant crops that cost more. Or NPC guards to be hired to protect the crops. It should be your typical risk/reward system, where a long term crop has potential for large reward, but it will take luck or protection to mature to full value.
Minigames
Though not appropriate for all cases, minigames are great for short term gardening and should be there to give it some kind of interesting activity. Finding pests, pulling weeds, training your guard dog to chase off racoons (think Black & White creature training), sorting seeds, searching the crop for new hybrids or mutants, etc. However you can't require minigames for long term plantings as that requires players to always be logged in.
Why People Farm
There should be ways to farm purely for aesthetics. Some people will do it purely for personal pleasure if you give them sufficient ability to make interesting things. Why would they do it in a game? Well my guess is because they will do it in real life. That said it would be nice to have a reward system of sorts. ATITD has a fun system for creating sculptures where other players can vote your artwork as "nice" or "not nice" - and you get rewarded if you get enough "nice" votes.
Personal gardening also would tie very nicely in with the notion of player housing. Choose the paint color, the rug and furniture, but also give it a nice garden out front - or hire another player to put one in for you.
Second, there should be ways to farm for personal food beyond just "Ok now I have enough corn and peas to feed me for a day!" More like "If I dedicate a day to farming I will have enough food for a week or two. Something I like about woodworking in LOTRO is that if you make your own bow, it is better than any bow you can buy from a vendor - which gives you a very strong incentive to actually do it. Same should go for food.
Also, tie in food growing to cooking. There should be ways to grow your own crops then cook with them to create special foods with special abilities such as some kind of superior sustenance.
Lastly, farming for profit. One should be able to plant very large crops that take days to grow and a certain amount of preparation and attention to guarantee a good harvest. And if a sufficient harvest is had, it can be sold for a good profit. 4 days spent waiting for or watching your crops could be as valuable as 4 days just killing proverbial boars and vendoring the loot.
Comment by waldo — 3 January, 2008 @ 9:16 PM