TheGreciansHousehold wrote:These are all great ideas, but the slime ideas would take ridiculously long to program and would cause lag.
The ranch is supposed to be disorganised and difficult to control - if you could do everything in a matter of seconds with no difficulty, there would be no point to most slimes' rancher risks.
Actually the emoting is quite simple to code in. Yes every bit of code adds more for the game to cycle through however this is quite minimal impact at all considering the extremely minor amount of code required to do this (When I say minimal I mean incredibly insignificant). Does not require an over abundance of emotes either, just a few for flavor. Time sink, minimal to implement. Not sure how slow they are with art, it's just a matter of skin/texture swapping as it looks like they have all the animations already in place.
The silo idea is less complicated than the one currently in place for silos in terms of coding. Having drop boxes for both market and research at every place only adds more instances where the existing code can trigger so is quite negligible on performance. Simple really.
Hazards can come in many forms, such as faulty equipment, slime breakouts, predators/pests invading the land, disease, climate/weather, literal sabotage from some unfriendly/prankster-ish sort, market de/inflation, etc... There are two main things this game has you do; Tend to a ranch, and explore a world. They aren't choices these two game elements as you need to explore to get the initial slimes and crops so you can unlock things at your ranch to continue exploring. These two game elements are linked as not all slimes can be caught, and some inventions at the research base require specific plorts. Now if either one of those two game elements become the sole focus, you are cutting off half of the integral part of the game. I'm going to throw in a comparison of a popular management farming game.
The Harvest Moon franchise. Your main aspect of making money is by fixing and building up a farm. Efficiency is paramount if you plan on ever getting to do a lot of the other things the game has to offer. As you get more money, you'll expand your farm for even more money. Expanding creates more work for the player to have to deal with however, the player gains upgrades that eliminates most of that. Lets go back to Slim Rancher.
Slime Rancher gives you more plots to use, but doesn't provide a player with any means to make things more manageable. Some examples I will throw down which should be evident in your game.
> Plots are far too scattered to be of good use.
>The automatic feeder wastes a large amount of food.
>The plort collector doesn't work most of the time unless manually pressed
>There is no auto-harvest of crops to make sure they don't go to waste
Upgrading causes more work than it solves in Slime Rancher. That's not how upgrades should work. With every increase of complexity the player should be given an equal boost to make that complexity trivial (generally through upgrades which the player must work to obtain). That is basic game design 101. Now I know there are portals in this game and I haven't had the chance to try them out as I get lost a lot trying to find my way around in the world, and I need specific plorts to make those portals. I don't know if they last forever and if they need a specific place to set them up. So my distance issue may very well be moot. Just need to find out if I can place them where I want them for easy of travel and remembering.
The letter correspondences would take some time to be creative in writing up. Again it is a very insignificant process requirement of the game's code since it's just text and remembering some key choices from the player. Take a gander at how small those old text adventures are and what they are capable of just as an example. Also not difficult at all to implement.
Sorry if it seems I'm throwing my coding/game design knowledge around, XD. These people here have all the required skills already to make any of my suggestions happen, if they choose to do so. In the end it is really up to them. If the suggestions aren't taken, I wont be upset over it. I have played my moneys-worth of entertainment from this game already and will probably plug in a few more hours to continue to explore the world.
EDIT. fixing up my English. My English teacher would be so proud :P XD