ISSUES
1. Daily maintenance of the ranch is far too time consuming. I had to revamp my ranch to leave half of it deserted in order to free up enough time each day to explore at all.
2. Over all satisfaction of activities is low.
I know the development roadmap references drones coming in the future to potentially help with issue #1. But I feel there is a much better and intuitive solution, and it comes in three simple parts.
SOLUTIONS
1. Introduce a random food surplus event.
2. Cut plorts in half.(Non-favorite food means only a 50% chance they make a plort. favorite guarantees they produce a plort.)
3. Reduce deflation of plort values to compensate for the part above. (Basically, make plorts worth an average of twice as much to compensate quantity being cut in half)
DESIGN GOAL
To create a more varied and satisfying feeling game flow.
Having maintenance tasks that need to be done every single day means that you can never just take a day off to go explore. Harvest Moon always had an elegant and simple solution to this when it came to watering your crops. Some days it would rain. You would walk out your door and just like that, you notice you have a MUCH more freed up schedule that day. Hense a random food surplus event.
The first time I woke up to a glow morning I didn't know what to make of it. But now I consider that occasional glow one of the most beautiful things about the far far range. I don't know how it works or why. But a lot of my best stories and adventures started with one of those amazing mornings.
-H
When you wake up on a glow morning, the skybox looks different for a little while, to make it clear the event has occurred. And all of the produce, chickens, etc, that day produce twice as much as normal. This would allow the player to stuff the pens with double the usual amount of food. So the next day, they would be just fine ignoring the usual food gathering chore. They could take a day off and go explore.
The changes to plorts are to reduce the sheer amount of time one has to spend standing at pens and market stands holding the mouse button down, and to make it actually feel GOOD. I rather quickly started to feel like I was hauling massive jars filled with pennies around. There were so many plorts to collect it could take hours and hours of in game time to do it, and then I'd just stand there spewing huge streams of the stuff in to the market and feel like I was getting chump change for them. Harvest day is supposed to be exciting! It's the reward you've been working hard and waiting for! But in the current game, EVERY day is harvest day, and you're harvesting and hauling giant penny jars. It really doesn't feel good or rewarding. And its incredibly tedious.
I feel these changes would address the issues drones are intended to address, and do it in a way that doesn't mean giving the player a way to automate their farm and remove themselves from the core gameplay. It also does so in ways that improve the over all experience of the game, rather than just sort of put a band-aid on a sore spot.
EXTRA CREDIT
Just a couple other ideas that I feel would improve the experience, but are less crucial in my mind:
- I would really love to see variety in hunger buildup and plort production of various slimes, and have plort values reflect that. Maybe crystal slimes only eat once a day. Period. But pink slimes eat 4 times a day. And Mosaic slimes eat a normal amount each day, but even with their favorite food, they only have a 25% chance of producing a plort. Largo's simply merge these statistics in some way. Variety is what allows the player to feel accomplished about even the daily chores. Because its not the same every day, and how you lay out your ranch and when you do what could really be rewarded by thinking ahead! This could add some more strategy to what largos you want to produce too.
- Silos. An entire structure taking an entire plot of land can only store as much as the upgraded vacuum I am literally carrying around the entire island with me...? Silos are absolute rubbish. They need to store a larger variety, and more of it, to be worth their plot of land. I don't see why they can't have 8 slots instead of 4. And be upgraded to hold 500 or more items per slot.
- Make going to sleep a thing. I didn't realize until near the end of the run that there is NO penalty for just staying awake constantly. That is totally unintuitive, unimmersive, and I really hope the game isn't being balanced around you never sleeping... Trying to beat the clock and get things done each day before you have to sleep is one of the primary driving forces of this style of game.