Gleaner Heights: A mystery farming sim

[vdweller]

EDIT: The game is out:

http://store.steampowered.com/app/786580/Gleaner_Heights/

It's time I made a thread just for this. After Emerge: Cities of the Apocalypse, I began developing an idea that was running around my mind for some time: Your classic pixel-art farming simulator like Harvest Moon but in a more Twin Peaks-esque atmosphere: Townsfolk have their own secrets, and you can change their lives for ever. A great evil looms over (or better, under) the peaceful village. Of course, you can ignore all this mystery stuff and just plant your crops and tend to your animals. The game will also have combat and it will be significantly more fluid compared to other games of this genre: You can roll, do dash attacks, power attacks etc. A huge village map with over 30 villagers, each with their own schedule has been created.

I will update this thread as the game grows. I began developing in June 2016 and still have many things to implement but a huge portion of the infrastructure is already done, like crops and animal mechanics.

Some screenies:

Dev blog

 

[vdweller]

A small preview of combat

 

[Durwyn]

Looks good. I will keep my eye on this one.

 

[MRY]

Whoa, not the follow up to AOD that I was expecting.

Spoiler

 

[Severian Silk]

You could make combat be more "genre" specific, like wooden stakes for vampires, silver bullets for werewolves.

I would make combat a more of a "special" and rare thing, with weird assymmetric mechanics like the rook in chess.

For instance, maybe some enemies can only be defeated when there is a full moon. At all other times, you have to run and barricade yourself in the house or get eaten.

Other enemies could have poor daylight vision, so it's better to attack them during the day. Etc.

 

[vdweller]

Whoa, not the follow up to AOD that I was expecting.

Spoiler

Well you could say that this is AOD II, which stands for "Age Of Dates", that is from dates (crops, since it's a farming sim), or from dating villagers. I'm going to stop here.

 

[V_K]

Well you could say that this is AOD II, which stands for "Age Of Dates", that is from dates (crops, since it's a farming sim), or from dating villagers. I'm going to stop here.

Given that it's a farming sim, it's more likely that AoD would stand for Age of Dung.

 

[MRY]

Acres of Dirt.

 

[zwanzig_zwoelf]

Why the protag looks like an ex-convict in some of the screenshots? Is that a feature?

Spoiler

Turning village folks into your sex slaves confirmed!

 

[Severian Silk]

The characters all look kinda angry. Is that intentional?

 

[vdweller]

The characters all look kinda angry. Is that intentional?

Nah. You can only do so much with a bunch of pixels.

 

[Severian Silk]

You could give them a sort of surprised look.

 

[vdweller]

Season changes:

 

[vdweller]

Interesting combat in a farming game

February was Combat month. This means that I had to setup attack hitboxes, special moves and enemies. I didn't design and implement as many enemies as I wanted. So far there are 9 "normal" enemies and a "boss" one. There is definitely room for more content there and, besides, some enemies not done yet are crucial to the main story.



Since the game's atmosphere is more akin to this of a suburban gothic 90's TV series, a certain degree of realism is expected of the game world. Sure, there may be mysterious entities and a hint of otherworldly powers, but their impact will be much greater when contrasted with a more down-to-earth environment. Would the encounter of killer BOB by the main characters in Twin Peaks be such a harrowing event if in the rest of the series we watched townsfolk fighting zombies?



Attacking while running will perform a dash attack. Possibly unlocked with a tool upgrade or skill, attacking again during a dash attack will follow with a 360 degree spinning ground slam. Each tool has a different area of effect but the overall outcome is pretty devastating.

Attacks can be avoided by rolling. You roll by tapping the run button. As a fan of the Souls Series, it's pretty awesome to see that you can run and roll under an enemy projectile and then immediately follow up with a dash attack. Rolling can get you out of harm's way quickly, but it costs stamina.



I had many thoughts about stamina consumption and how depleting it would affect the game. Initially I considered going the classic Harvest Moon way: Stamina reaches zero, you pass out. But in a game like this, where you can go down a cave and fight a lot, this approach is very limiting. Sure, you can eat stuff and gain back some stamina, but pausing combat every now and then to chomp down stuff to avoid passing out feels like a detracting chore. Then I thought about regenerating stamina, again like in Dark Souls. But this would make the farming part trivial, and this is primarily a farming game. So I devised the following scheme:

You have a Health meter and a Stamina meter. Using tools in your farm or in combat consumes stamina. More powerful tool uses cost more stamina. If your stamina reaches zero you can still perform basic tool actions and probably run and roll at reduced efficiency. Using more powerful attacks at zero stamina will eat up health instead. If health reaches zero, you pass out and wake up in the clinic with the Doctor and his snarky remarks. He is quite old, after all, and he's seen quite a lot...



As a final note for combat mechanics, I chose not to go with the "enemies touch you, you lose health" approach. I know this is a game, and games have conventions: Yesterday I was tired. I looked up but there was no depleted stamina bar above my head. But the "bad enemy touch" approach just feels too goofy and Super Mario-esque to me this time. Enemies are solid entities. They can't pass through you, you can't pass through them. Abandoning the bad enemy touch design, you gain two benefits: First, you are forced to think of interesting attack patterns when designing them. Making the enemy itself the source of damage just kind of forces you to go down the easy path, make every enemy head towards you and maybe add a token bullet shoot every now and then. But now you have to devise special moves for when the player is too close or far away. Second, you get this risk-and-reward approach playstyle: You know that is safe to stay close to an enemy. Will you be able to land a hit or two before skillfully dodging its sweeping attack? Again, I think this approach makes for more interesting combat gameplay, where you don't just have to avoid generic enemy graphics with generic walk animations.

So with the combat system explained, here are some of the enemies you will encounter in Gleaner Heights.


Hedgehog

Hedgehogs are not tough animals to fight, but they can raise their spikes when you are near them and can roll into a spike ball and charge you.


Boar


Boars have a lot of health and will charge from a distance. Evade and counterattack before they charge again.



Slime


I was conflicted about the presence of slimes given the down-to-earth approach laid out above. But for some reason, they don't look all that supernatural to me. It's just a bizarre life form, not some undead horror. They throw blobs at you but aren't dangerous overall (at least the common, green variety). More powerful slimes may require more...acidic approaches to be utterly destroyed. Did I mention you can use your watering can to sprinkle more than just water?

Worm


Worms are an exception to the "bad enemy touch" rule (or lack thereof). When you approach them, they tend to head towards you, damaging you with their touch. They're worms after all.

Maneater


A dangerous plant: It shoors homing toxic spores and can burrow underground. This one will put your rolling skills to the test.



Bat


Bats circle you and emit a damaging sonic wave. May prove tricky when fighting more than one at a time.




More enemies will populate the world of Gleaner Heights. To the west of the town there is a vast area known as the Hunting Grounds. But that's probably a story for another post. For this post, I would like to conclude by saying that I realky liked the idea of flexibility in movement, not just in combat but everywhere. The original Harvest Moon for the Super Nintendo had your character jump over fences. Some of the subsequent games ditched this idea, so I'm putting it back in: You and your horse can jump over fences!

 

[vdweller]

Fishing and weather are here!

 

[Mustawd]

Hedgehog

 

[vdweller]

Since the last post, my main focus was on creating character dialogue. Now characters introduce themselves and also have something to say depending on the season, the weather, whether they are visiting someone else etc. Also, they accept gifts. There are four levels of reaction to a gift: They can hate your gift, be neutral about it, like it or love it. Your "friendship" level is adjusted accordingly. A common mechanic in these games is that when you give them a present on their birthday, the gift reaction value is multiplied. Also, multiple gifts per day can be given, but each subsequent gift has an even lesser effect.







When your friendship level with an NPC reaches a certain threshold, they will reward you in some way: Either with some town lore, a present of their own, some piece of clothing, a skill increase or a food recipe/crafting schematics. Friendship events haven't been implemented yet, but at least their dialogue is 99% done. Finally, in order to unlock certain events for some NPCs, you have to reach a certain friendship level.

Another aspect is the alternate townsfolk schedules: For example, some characters stay inside when it's raining. Or, meddling with a married character's private affairs may result in that character staying at the hotel instead of their own home...







Needless to say, all this work is a pain in the ass. Characters may no longer be around at some point, and the rest of the townsfolk has to react to such developments. They also say unique things when presented with certain items.



So currently I'm adding the alternate schedules of the "married to you" versions of some characters. Their schedule is largely the same when not married to you, but obviously they stay in your (fully upgraded) house and will allocate some of their morning time helping you at the farm, when asked to do so the previous day. Initially, I considered programming the husband/wife to actually walk around the farm, watering crops or picking them up for shipping. But this plan has some hurdles:

1) They must be really versatile when it comes to obstacle recognition. In a perfectly static farm, there should be no problem finding the crop, walking to an adjacent, unobstructed tile and watering it or picking it up. But at the same time you might be near him as well, tossing around fences like mad. You can see how this can become problematic.

2) Besides the real-time farm working, a certain amount of work has to be accomplished even when you're not near the farm. This means that an off-screen simulation has to take place for ensuring that you companion is not slacking

I'm not saying it is impossible to code a competent AI (and there are plans for a robotic helper, but it's a small guy and can completely ignore obstacles), but I'll leave this on the back burner for now. The present situation is, you wake up and if you have assigned a morning job for your spouse and the weather is good enough for them, they wait for you outside the farm, informing you when spoken to that they did it.



Also, town festivals are on the horizon! In previous farming games like Harvest Moon, when it was a festival day, all NPC houses were locked all day, probably to force you to go around the place until you hit the town square and start the festival event. I find his a bit...unnatural. First of all, I'm not sure I want 100% of the townsfolk present in all festivals. Maybe, like, 20 of them will be present? The rest will go about their businesses as usual. Second, I don't plan to go with the "locked doors" approach. People start their schedules like every other day, but when you get close to the festival area, the screen fades to black and then you are inside the area with everyone else. Festivals won't eat up all your day: They can begin at, say, 10 am and end at 4 pm. So everyone, including you, can carry on with their business, without NPCs vanished behind locked doors. The only thing I have to take care of is to forbid "irrelevant" NPCs moving in and out of the festival area when it's part of their schedule.



So that's the outline of my immediate tasks. But what else was added aside from NPC interaction?



Fishing

Yup. You have your fishing rod. You go to bodies of water, cast it, then wait for a bite. It's more like a reflex game, but having a high level rod/fishing skill helps. So far, 42 fishes are in the game and there are plans to add some more, as well as some unique ones.






Your horse

The town of Gleaner Heights is pretty large. As such, going around on horseback is not just for the looks: It's mandatory if you want to be in a lot of places within a single day. As with other large animals, holding down the Interact button and then moving causes you to "walk" the horse where you're going. Tapping the Interact button while facing the horse will make you leap on it, and the same goes for dismounting it. The horse will run when you hold the Run button, and when so it can jump over fences, much like you can on foot. Affection/brushing mechanics have not been implemented yet. But hey, the stable is ready.







Weather

Aside from the most frequent "normal" state of the weather, additional weather types are here:

1) Rain (bad for your animals)

2) Snow (bad for your animals)

3) Fog (lower visibility but otherwise no other effect for you or your animals).

4) Heat wave: A summer exclusive. Problematic for your animals and you, as using tools when outdoors will consume more stamina than normal.

5) Freezing cold: A winter exclusive with pretty much the same effects as its summer counterpart.

6) Storm: Contrary to other farming games where you are locked inside your house on a stormy day, I'm thinking of letting the main character go out in a storm. Of course, it won't be pretty. Also, expect some crop destruction, as well as some chicken being blown away by the wind if left outdoors.






TV

So far only the weather forecast channel has been implemented.





Crafting

Although in the earliest of stages, it's a shame not to include it here. You perform crafting on the bench of your farm workshop. You can create from pieces of clothing to bombs and cheese machines! Related items have yet to be added, but the bare-bones infrastructure is here.



So, many features are ready (or halfway there), but many more await in their respective queues. I have to create a number of indoors locations. Cutscenes for many in-game events are also not in place yet. Also, remember talking in earlier posts about boat-travelling in the river and underwater exploration with your diving suit? I haven't given up on this one! But I feel like some story-critical sections of the game should be completed first. To be honest, it's a race against time. Since I am now into full-time game development, I live on whatever income Emerge has generated (and still is, albeit at a much slower rate). Oh, and the upcoming Steam Greenlight changes, namely the entry fee, may prove financially crippling. At my current status, the safe zone is until September 2107. After that...



I've thought about doing an Indiegogo campaign or maybe a Patreon for a minimal target (as in the four-digit range). Or (shudder) go for early access. But I'm trying to avoid all of these for as long as I can...

 

[vdweller]

Here's a night illumination WIP for all you playas

Blog update coming soon!

 

[Delterius]

This is... quite interesting indeed. The 'mystery' almost 'modern fantasy' twist isn't something that you see every day in farming games. That's a good hook. Combat aside, are you planning for any other systems that support that angle?

 

[laclongquan]

Do you know what's the difference between a farmer fighting zombie and another game? The farmer use farming tools to fight: fork, woodchopping axe, butcher long knife, long handle scythe, short sickle etc...

Do you know the difference between a modern farmer fighting zombie and a ancient-style farmer fighting zombie? Modern has shotgun, sporting crossbow, composite longbow, bullets, silver bullet... and low amount of silver bullets because making them is specific workshop and you import. You have to scrounge for silver bullet and silvertip bolts arrows.

Ancient farmer has maybe primitive crossbow, wood longbow, shortbow, and low amount of bolts/arrows because making them is labor-intensive, and military supply (ie the farmer has to hand over to government as a form of military tax). You have to scrounge for arrows and bolts. Any enemy need silver weapon to damage will be dangerous because you can only have silver knife from the rich houses' cupboard, and maybe one or two silvertip bolts from the only smith in the region.

 

[vdweller]

Another screenie. You are able to fund town projects, like repairing the town well. When completed, these projects offer something new, like being able to explore the river area with a boat when repairing the pier. In the screenshot below, restoring the playground causes the kids to go there and play on afternoons. Plus, everyone will love you a little bit more.

 

[vdweller]

Here's a quick question: How do these music tracks sound to you?

https://soundcloud.com/emilios-manolidis

Would you play a harvest moon-ish / twin peaks-y game with such music? Is it decent? Good? Shit?

 

[80s Stallone]

sounds good to me.

 

[xxxCatholicKillahxxx]

I do not mean to offend you but that character naming screen track is simply too great for a character naming screen.
Also Hunting Grounds would benefit from being played in a more dim setting, sun setting over the forest or dusk perhaps.

Edit. All tracks sound good though.

 

[vdweller]

simply too great for a character naming screen

You mean too...grandiose?