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).

[Hasfusel]

Some sort of competition system with a rival farm would definitely be good, and I'd set the plot ending for about three years, four at most. It'd have to be a really good game to keep me interested for that long, though.

Extending your house and farm is always nice. Try to have a lot of different new buildings or house extensions available, or things to buy to put in your house. They don't even have to be particularly useful. You could have owning some as a requirement for marriage or having children, too. Oh, and It'd be worth making them expensive. A problem I always have with HM that getting rich often feels pointless since there's nothing to do with my wealth after about a year or two, and so there isn't much incentive to improve crop or animal quality or whatever.

Also, maybe make winning love points or whatever it'll take to get married tied more to winning competitions, talking frequently (lots of dialogue for potential spouses would be nice to keep this interesting), inviting them on dates, etc. Gift giving every day to raise affection is boring and dumb and I reckon it should only be effective on birthdays and festival days.