HM-style pixel art Options

[Nurse Fin]

Well, I'm no expert spriter or anything, but it's kind of fun (yet tedious... go figure). I know a lot of people have attempted to make their own HM games with little luck. I'm only really able to program stuff like a cooking system, advanced social system, calendar, mining system... but the actual farming has me stuck. Oh well. :P At least I can make graphics, too. If I ever get around to making a full working test bed I might want to make a fan game with original characters (not ToT/AP chars, I just used them for testing purposes) and stuff like that. :D Maybe... someday.

(IMG:http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v226/rinfin/dcee1391.png)
(IMG:http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v226/rinfin/1bf96d52.gif)

I've only made a few floor and wall tiles so far, no furniture or anything, and I've only finished a standard female walking template. But I made all this in about 6 hours, which isn't too bad :D

[Nurse Fin]

I'm not really sure how long it will take to finish. I think it will depend on how long I take with the graphics, and setting up all the characters (I'll look for help when the time comes to design the characters, like their appearance and personality/likes/dislikes/etc)... I'd say maybe sometime at the beginning of next year, it should be finished. If I can complete it earlier, that would be great, but I'd imagine it would take a minimum of 4 months to really make anything worth playing.

Help on the tilesets would be awesome :o But I haven't quite reached that stage yet; I'm going to set up all the core gameplay mechanics (sans social system) before getting all the map and character graphics done.




As for how it would feel... well, I'm going to try and make it feel as much like a Harvest Moon game as possible, by the end of it I don't plan on having any RTP graphics or sounds in there...
But in this stage of development, I'm pretty much limited to the RTP and placeholder graphics
The little half-circle on the top screen rotates around based on the time of day, and the portrait art (when I get around to it) will change depending on the player's condition, like if s/he is tired, sick, etc. If nothing is equipped, the "equipped" window will disappear. Likewise, if the player is holding something a similar window will appear on screen with the held item's name and icon (a picture of the item will also appear over the player's head, and the walking graphic will change to a "holding" one).

Unfortunately, I couldn't make a classic HM-farming system with a wide open field. I tried working on it with programming, but it ends up lagging pretty badly (not to mention I'm not the greatest scripter out there), and if I did it all with events it would use up hundreds of variables (5 variables and 2-3 switches for each single square on the field), possibly more, and the lag would still be terrible. Even the creators of the series often seem to have troubles dealing with lag when there are lots of crops on-screen, and their engine is built specifically for the farming system... so yeah.

Instead I've made something more inspired by My Little Shop's system, but faster-paced and more advanced. So basically you farm your crops in small patches; using your hoe tills the soil, watering can waters it, hammer removes tilled soil/seeds, sickle removes growing crops/dead crops. Hoe level determines the size of your harvest, and watering can level determines how long it takes for the crops to grow. If you neglect your crops, or if it's the wrong season, they die. It's nothing really fancy but it retains most of the basic features.