Hey guys, so I decided to make a new game. I thought something like Harvest Moon - a farming simulation. But different in the art and overall theme, amybe even add and change some gameplay elements. But the basics would remain, townspeople, relationships, foraginf, fishing, mining, and farming.
I'll be making it on Construct, been messing around with it for quite some time. And the good part is, Networking is a huge possibility, maybe something like hamachi or idk. 

So anyway guys, help a fellow GWer brainstorm for ideas. Anything would do, I mean just throw any wild ideas, yea, anything, and I'll see what I could do with it. Doesn't even have to make much sense, just want to make a game that I - or hopefully other people - would love to play.

Before people start posting something like I should think this by my own.
I posted this not because I don't have enough creative juice to do this on my own(no really), I just thought, hey, other people might want to play something that they don' really want to make themselves. And I think whatever the end product is, it might be worth something not only to me but to others as well.

You don't have to be a game designer to comment. 

Hero Bash, lets make that a flash game and become millionaire. I think multiplayer games consist mostly of a client sending messages to a server and the server broadcasting those messages to everyone else so they're probably not that hard to make. Yeah yeah I know a serious server is needed but it's an investment. Herobash, we could make a farm simulator with a twist. It's a multiplayer game where you play as a landless farmer, so you  have to squat. Then you can hire hitmen to attack the enemy farmers. The current farmer browser games are too cute. I know this has almost nothing to do with your idea, but I think it would work. It would be much better as a flash game because then anyone would be able to play it, even from cell phones, ipad etc (I think what steve jobs is doing is trolling adobe into improving flash so I believe flash games for ipad etc will be a future trend). Now think about it, you could replace farms with villages so  it's a feud simulator instead. You get to trade your produce and invest in science (which is actually the people adding content like factories. If enough imaginary coins are sent to science, everyone can start using new technologies).

add a hidden layer of murder mystery that the player may or may not discover in the late game. drop terrible hints by selling bubble pipes and sherlock holmes detective hats in stores. progressively increase the amount of dark fog and mystery until the player is forced to move from being a wealthy farmer in the countryside to being a private detective in an apartment complex trying to find his wife's killer.

make it such that if you ignore your wife she cheats on you with the milkman.

have psychotropic vegetables occasionally appear on your farm.

have the worst neighbours possible move in next door just as things are looking up. threaten to shoot your dog because he's 'dangerous.'

force players to deal with the issues surrounding organics and genetic engineering. send obnoxious protesters. send equally obnoxious corporate lobbypersons.

have the market forecast for what you grow available to the weather forecast. allow players to branch into obscure farming like the greenery for flower arrangement and square watermelons for japan. (not a joke. people really do have entire plots of land devoted to stuff like this. i am related to some of them.)

put a deserted casino on the outskirts of town. are there ghosts?????

Funny, I thought since you kept talking about being so interested in playing bullet hell shooters, you'd be more inclined to attempt making one of those instead.

Although I'm actually looking forward to what comes from your idea either way. I just thought it uncanny because I'm trying to make a bullet hell shooter myself. I'll definitely be looking here for more input on my project once I get a few of the basic systems testable and working. Maybe we can play each other's games if either or us end up getting anything accomplished throughout the summer.

add a hidden layer of murder mystery that the player may or may not discover in the late game. drop terrible hints by selling bubble pipes and sherlock holmes detective hats in stores. progressively increase the amount of dark fog and mystery until the player is forced to move from being a wealthy farmer in the countryside to being a private detective in an apartment complex trying to find his wife's killer.

whoa!!

This is giving me hell of ideas. A typical farming sim that gets you into a happy little routine, and then completely disrupts it once you're settled. Like, one day you find a human skeleton while tilling your field and think "wow, that's a pretty creepy easter egg heh". But then more eerie little things start to seep in, like mutilated livestock, shadowy figures following you around after dark, etc. It would be pretty neat to have the player gradually transition their priorities from picking vegetables and managing their social calendar to sizing up townsfolk as potential murderers.

you're up in the mountains chopping lumber at night and you hear people moving around in the bushes

you read the diary of that lady at the bakery to check her heart meter but instead it's filled with 200 pages of psychotic, disjointed scrawling

maybe a twist ending, the weird stuff was all coincidence, main character is actually paranoid as fuck and ends up slowly destroying himself over enemies that don't exist

SO MANY IDEAS!!!

Okay so I;ve read what was posted so far.

@Mince: I believe this is a joke. Though I try to extract ideas in every post possible, there's really  nothing there. But if it concerns the multiplayer /networking of the game, I think I'll just end up with an online scoreboard and achievements, that would be very easy to do actually, construct supports it. Also, I could always use Python if I decide to have some more advanced functionalities(UDP,etc..)

make it such that if you ignore your wife she cheats on you with the milkman.

I'll stay faithful with the rival(s)<->girl model of original so it's qite possible that rival will continue buging you.. nice idea.

have psychotropic vegetables occasionally appear on your farm.

I plan on having mutations on crops/animals/food/etc. so this is possible, possibly buffs or debuffs, even change in appearance or perception of those around..

have the worst neighbours possible move in next door just as things are looking up. threaten to shoot your dog because he's 'dangerous.'

I plan on having a rival famer, which is actualy harder to implement thatn could be imagined. More complex AI than the average NPCs.

force players to deal with the issues surrounding organics and genetic engineering. send obnoxious protesters. send equally obnoxious corporate lobbypersons.

I try to keep away from advanced technology, even just implied or hinted. It could be manifested however(mutated stuff).

have the market forecast for what you grow available to the weather forecast. allow players to branch into obscure farming like the greenery for flower arrangement and square watermelons for japan. (not a joke. people really do have entire plots of land devoted to stuff like this. i am related to some of them.)

market forecast sounds good. Branch? meaning some kind of skill tree.. I think that could make the 'farming' aspect of the game more complex(not sure if it's better or worse) but I think I'd include it anyway. Something like you could only plant this if you have knowledge of how to plant it.. yea

put a deserted casino on the outskirts of town. are there ghosts?????

1. Dynamic town..yea, it changes.
2. I stick to the dead grandpa plot of older hm games.. so who knows?

you should put time travel in it. the following eras come to mind

- prehistoric
- antiquity
- middle ages
- future
- apocalypse

If I'll be sticking to single town(which I will) this could only be possible by some phenomenon that would cause the current town to exist on a different era. Meaning the town would change itself to fit that era, flintstones, knights and bricks, victorian and steampunk, futuristic(i'll skip that), fallout-like..but spiritually - the characters, events, are the same only different in costume, theme, etc..
Whoa, this is very hard to implement for plenty of reasons. 
However, if it's something like you could play in one of your dreams(probably after being psyched by mutated food) on those time eras, it could open up plenty of possibilities for puzzles-like quests and actually learn a bit more of the whole background plot.
So I'l keep this in mind.

@Biggles and Trashhead - about that psychological/thriller hybrid to a farming simulation.
Hmm.. I think that is also a great surprise and could be funny, ridiculous, or plain messy. Plain messy is the one I try to avoid, and it will be if this feature ruins the gameplay balance.
I'm considering chapter by chapter model for the game. Like there is a semi-linear story that opens upmore to the game(I'm looking at GTA and Bully for inspirations). This feature could as well be in a chapter and after being somewhat mainstreamed, it could finish off being a more semi-feature for the rest of the game.

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Anyway, I think I made this reply too long. But Ibelieve I need to plan some things and I know this project would grow to be very ambitious for me, I'm not stopping though, it's already the fun of it that is driving me to hit this thing homerun.
I've written somepages of possible features and characters, which I won't spoil for the moment and also outlined the flow of the game development itself. So yea it's on planning stage. I'd post some concept art soon,  it helps me design things and I could get some cc on the process.



btw, I got plenty of ideas from this:
http://www.hmfarm.com/page.php?file=dreamgame


@EvilDemonCreature
Yea, I'd love to play more shmups so be sure to notify me of your game's progress.

It's not a joke the thing about flash is that it runs on anything. And I want to make a browser game of some sort.

you should basically remake Harvestmoon 64 (the best HM game, btw) but with that added detective story thing. that'd be hella cool

@Mince: yea, however I'm not familiar with flash.
@Parker - never played the original, I'm using BTN and FMT as ground references but 'research' on other gmes of the series..

So I said I'm gonna post some concept art asap but I was making the characters and just sketching the gameplay features and how to implement them, etc..

So I have 65 town characters - I'm thinking it's a bit too much. Which includes 10 marriageable girls and 20 rivals - 2 for each girl. Well you also somehow affect who marries who.

As for the game itself, I was working on creating Inverse Kinematics system for it. It's a whole different style as I was planning a 'dressing' feature as well as town people having different clothes for different times.. It would also make animating and expressing stuff more graphically advanced than original hm games..

@Terrorantula: I considered also giving the ability of playingas girl or boy. But it's a 'luxury' feature. What I mean is, I may include it but it's not in priority. Reason being is that I'm wondering if the added option would have great payoffs. If I were to include being girl then that would change not only the sotryline etc but also some of the core gameplay style. Courting for example. As a boy you choose who to date and marry etc, but I think that if you play as girl, you ge the boys to like you and then you say yes to whoever proposes. etc.. 

@Dr. Ears: I'm kinda guessing that the core elements of harvest moon are there but I'm interested on knowing what you would like to improve in the game that you play.

I had an idea for a browser based game. It's a collaborative city-state simulation game, it starts with an open map, with natural resources etc and anyone can suggest any change they want to it. For example, someone makes a suggestion to build a house somewhere, someone else suggests to build a factory and so on. If more than one people decides to make something in the same spot, a certain number of players are chosen to decide which thing should be built in that space. Then there is the economy, environmental problems, health, crime etc. It's kind of a ancient-greek-democracy simulator. I don't know anything about ancient-greek-democracy but I think my game can work.

waw

By the way I thought this was an idea sharing topic I'm sorry if I didn't read the first post

No, your ideas are welcome please share some more, I need to fill up my list of not to do..