Recently I noticed two atrocities--a: the rune factory/harvest moon games haven't evolved or fixed many of their major problems in like forever, and b: there is, as far as I can find, no Touhou-themed Harvest Moon game. I would like to remedy both of these problems. I currently need programmers and artists to get this off the ground, but there's room for about any position you'd see on a game project.
I have done some mock-ups to help illustrate what I am thinking. (and by "I have done" i mean i went to my friend and said "pleaaaaaaaaaaaaaaase" until she did it(note: all of these designs would, of course, be subject to heavy change in development)).
http://i.imgur.com/x5Xk1jG.png This is the basic UI. The player(may or may not be Marisa in the end) can move around the map and interact with things just like you'd expect from any other game. HP is self-explanatory, and MP is for use of special skills or magic. If any of you have played RF, you might notice that there is no RP. This is because I believe that RP is a needless gate--it serves to restrict the amount of actions a player can take in a given day and make them think about what they want to do, but the RF games already have a resource for that--time. I believe this game-type can be greatly improved by removing RP and focus on making time the primary resource for players to manage. In the upper right, you can see the date/time, minimap and quick switch(which I'll talk about in a bit) in the normal spot for that sort of thing.
http://i.imgur.com/rFWL8wu.png This is the basic inventory screen. Simple and serves its purpose. Surprisingly, the RF UI has not been streamlined for console use and is incredibly clunky to use(open menu -> go to inventory -> go to item and click -> drag item to hand slot -> leave menu), so this model streamlines that down to three commands -> open inventory, select what item you want, and do what you want. For example, the hold command could instantly pop the player back into the game with them picking the item out of their pack, saving them time and effort. The info tab could also serve to give the player critical information on what items are useful for crafting, precise stats, etc.
http://i.imgur.com/2AvpqLg.png This is the status screen. IMO this screen should be reached via "L or R" in the inventory screen(which would serve as the first screen seen when pressing the menu button), as it's not needed anywhere near as often as the inventory. This offers a quick access to the screen without forcing the players to move through needless menus(cough cough tides of destiny). The menu is incredibly self explanatory. There are your stats and your equipment(and possibly skills, though I currently question their value in a RF type game as they were primarily linked to RP usage). You can see a cursor over the equipment. Choosing a piece will open a menu that will filter out everything but the equipment that can be put on that slot and show you the stat changes that would take place. (
http://i.imgur.com/Es9CxqH.png ) This seems really obvious and basic but RF games literally do not do this. I can't even.
http://i.imgur.com/Q8lF3xI.png Finally, this is the quick select screen. A major issue in the HM and RF games is that you end up with a great deal of tools, and you usually have to dive into your inventory and manually equip what you want. This is an issue I'm surprised to still see happen. My idea here is that the dpad(or 1-4 on keyboard) will be used to select pairs of items. These items can then be quickly switched between using an L or R button, or Q/E on keyboard(for example). Players can fill the slots with the items they choose in the patterns they choose. For farming, they could have their hoe and their seeds on one pair, and then their watering can and fertilizer on another. This would allow players to complete these actions with relatively little menu use. (As an aside, I question the value of equipping some tools at all instead of giving the player straightforward commands that get modified based on the tool's quality).
In terms of the actual gameplay, I'd like to tackle the major issues of poor event placement, binary combat and lackluster crafting. The HM/RF games have a tendency to give players little to no hint as to where to find/how to trigger special character events. Many players I've talked to very frequently just follow a guide as they play so they can hit all of their waifu's events. I'd like to give the players better guidance as to where to find events like that. In regards to combat, RF games tend to just flood rooms with enemies who only use one or two basic skills, and combat amounts to "press button repeatedly until everything is dead". I would like to solve this by giving enemies more potential abilities and deeply examine how each makes the player think and react. Fixing crafting is easy said, but doing will require careful balance of ingredients and recipe value.
So those are my general ideas for the game. IMO this is a strong concept that would be a lot of fun to make and play. Please let me know if you are interested, or have any input or suggestions on the idea. Thanks for reading.
