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, from what I've managed to gather 5 years of 30 day seasons is about the regular amount of time an average HM fan will give a regular harvest moon game with 30 day months.

Now, given that I want to give players who stick to the game to the end a reward and a challenge, I'll go for about 7 30 day season years for the final ending.

If I instead of using 30 days (and instead of resorting to Awl's 10) I go for between 14-15 day long seasons (I may go for a 5 day week meaning I want a number of days in a season not divisible by the days of the week). This would technically give me about 14 years of play until the final ending and lets take out two to offset some event fatigue.

That leaves us with about 12 playable years with seasons of between 14 or 15 days (give or take, I think ending on the last day of winter is a bit too neat for my liking) spread across a couple of chapters similarly to AwL representing about 50 years. This number isn't in any way final, but gives me a good framework for what I plan to do (especially when working on such things related to children and aging).

Also important to note: This project will be in 2d, I have nowhere near the resources necessary to make this 3d, and it probably won't exceed such titles as harvest moon for the snes or any Gameboy Advance era Games graphically.

New Questions:
-What shops do you find most important in each game? / Which do you visit most?
-If there were any shops / places you could do without (even some exclusive to certain games) which would they be?
-What is your opinion of the inclusion of a rival farm(s)?