In need of help from longtime fans, wow time has passed between me making this account and posting... Options

[Tales-Of-A-Fan]

Ok, I won't beat around the bush, I'm working on a fangame.
If your thinking I'm looking for team members, or graphical/programing/audio help, that's not what this thread is about.

Note:

Spoiler:
It is in an extremely early stage, I'm developing in java and am working on databases and systems before anything else, this means that for the longest time I won't be able to have any screenshots to show of it (if I do get that far), I may however post some early stuff I'll have ready that'll play as a text adventure more than anything else designed to test that these systems interact well.

Currently this occupies my time as a marginal hobby I am using to hone my skills with java, and I can't promise I'll get any far on this project.

What I am intrested in is people's opinions about certain things in most harvest moon games, particularly some of the systems at the base of them, the one however that promted me to post today was the inventory.

What type of inventory do you prefer in Harvest Moon games? One with limited space (ie: friends of mineral town) possibly expandable with backpacks of varying sizes, or an unlimted sized inventory like in a wonderfull life.

While this may not seem like much this is very important for me when it comes to the development of the game, whether or not I can predict the maximum number of items in the players inventory has allot of weight on how the code is written and getting this out of the way now could potentially keep me from having to re-write and re-debug the whole inventory at a later date.

Also, my petegree when it comes to harvest moon games boils down to Friends of Mineral Town, A Wonderful Life, Magical Melody, and the original Rune Factory so if any of the other games had any particular stand out features/fixes that anyone would want to see me implement in my project I'd be glad to hear about it (heck, even if you have any other ideas as to things that always bugged you in harvest moon games, or any other ideas in general I'd be glad to hear them).

[Tales-Of-A-Fan]

OK, I decided it's probably best to stick with the limited space system, although something similar to a weight system would kinda contradict a pretty big element in the project (one I'm not quite ready to reveal yet), so I'm just going to work off of volume instead.

What I'm working on is a system where the player starts out with limited space, (9 slots maybe) with some smaller items (grasses and such) available for stacking.

New questions:

-I was thinking that for seeds and planting I'd use a system where there bought in groups of either 9 (a large seed bag) like in FoMT and in bags of 4 where planting would occur similarly to in FoMT, except unused seeds would simply stack in bunch of up to 9. Does that sound any good? the initial field is going to be relatively small (about 5x5) so its enough space for one large seed-bag and four small ones exactly.

-how many in game years do you usually spend on a HM game before moving on to the next? (The project also has an element of beginning and end for the player charter (IE life to death) and the amount of years most people spend would be what I'd use to round out a lifetime, this a relevantly simple thing for me to change at this stage, but it could account for how long I make seasons, weeks, and days in game).