#its a little weird now trying to manage the differing orders of events tho aaaa

[mistercrowbar]

may not have chubby cheeks in game but he still pretty

[tumblunni]

and I’m just thinking about how much its a great template on how to make a small town feel like a real living world, and how to make you get to know characters organically, and such! there’s so much you can take influence from even in wildly different genres of game that dont share any of the same mechanics! So umm here’s my random post of thinking about things inspired by rune factory that I’d love to incorporate into my own games someday~! I think a lot of it could work best for my ‘cathedral tower’ game cos its about protecting a town of people, or my ‘zombie mum’ game cos it could have a lot of similar scavenging mechanics. HMMMM... This game just makes me so inspired!!!

* I really really REALLY like how you gain stat experience from doing various exploration activities around the world, and it translates into bonuses to your battle and/or farming skills. AND those battle and farming skills give bonuses to each other! Like.. walking, eating, taking a bath, throwing stuff, they all add small amounts to your hp or stamina bar. Which means you can farm more! And all the different types of farming and crafting activities, which you can do more of now, add vitality and accuracy and strength. And now you can battle more! And battling gives a very good growth curve of making you better at battling, there’s levels but there’s also great encouragement to try every weapon and magic in order to pump up your stats. Which is also great incentive to do crafting so you’ll actually be able to handle fighting with a low level weapon long enough to gain all the boosts. Which is a great incentive to farm and explore to get those ingredients in order to craft. Which is a great incentive to befriend the townsfolk, and level them up as your companions, and give them your leftover crafted items in order to equip them all good and make them more useful while raising friendship at the same time. aaaa everything links so well, its so well made! it means you can succeed in the game no matter which part of it you’re better at, and its easier to get into trying the stuff you maybe dont like as much. Except for the soil levelling system, thats annoyingly nonintuituive and non-tutorial’d compared to the rest...

* Anyway! Ideas for how it could be expanded even more to give you even more of a sense of progression! And also to make it less repetitive having to reexplore the same areas again and again looking for stuff that only spawns there. Eventually you’re gonna be stuck with a total lack of some early level item and you have to backtrack searching for where on earth it came from :P ANYWAY! The idea! Maybe you could level up your gathering skills with different forms of gathering? You kinda do have that with the mining/farming/etc, but it doesnt have any effect on what you gain, how fast you can gather, how much you gather, etc. It just gives you the battle stat boosts for gathering a lot. My idea was maybe like... if you have high level mining then maybe you have higher odds of finding rare rocks, getting more drops per rock, getting the rarer drops within the rare rocks, rocks respawning faster, etc. So it becomes less and less difficult the more powerful you get! And instead of lots of items being super limited to certain areas, technically every area contains the same rock items and its only your skill that determines what you get. With maybe just a little bit of a levelling curve, like if you enter a high level area earlier than you’re supposed to then its harder to mine a rock. Takes 50 swings instead of 5, or whatever. But this is also a reward for exploring there early, cos you get 50 chances to win a good item from that rock, instead of 5. (Provided you even have enough stamina to manage that!) And maybe high level rocks give more mining experience, or whatever. Aaaaand maybe there are indeed some area-exclusive drops, rather than necessarily everything scaling to your current level. But they wouldnt be as specific as in RF4, where I have to keep going back to this one haunted mansion thats the only damn place containing spiders so far! Like, have several areas at different levels throughout the game, so there’s always a new [item] hunting area thats relatively close to your level at all times. And maybe the higher level equivelant of like... the spider area, would give out bigger amounts of spider items and more exp and whatever. But you could still totally sit around grinding in the low level spider area and start getting higher level spidermeats if you do it enough, its just easier to grind at the later areas. So the level curve still works out! Man sorry this is a long confusing blabber cos i dunno how to explain this XD

* Alternative idea on how to make low level items still relatively available even when it becomes annoying to backtrack to those areas: Digimon World version! Alternative methods to acquire those items easily without gathering will appear as the game goes on. In DW1 the shops unlock in roughly this pattern. (Well, its a sandbox game so you can sequence break at some points and unlock shops in different orders, but yeah) Like around the time you’re 10 levels above [spider area], you get a merchant who sells those spider things. And by now you’ll be making a lot more profit so its way more feasable to just buy it all from them instead of backtracking to gather. Or maybe it could be part of a reward for befriending people? I thought in the cathedral game it would be good if you could set other characters to do work while you’re out adventuring, once youve earned their trust. So you could get an infinate source of those low level items through this method, and maybe get more appreciation for the characters when they’re being super helpful and all. And maybe you could set up various areas in your home base in order to change the low-level item that the npcs will farm. Like, set up a small pen full of tamed spiders that you can milk for cobwebs every day. And as the game goes on, you can upgrade your base and add more room for multiple item-farming areas at once.

* And also possibly have a small chance of characters randomly appearing each morning? Like, instead of necessarily having to backtrack around the town every single day to talk to everybody, once they’re a high enough friendship level they’ll randomly take the initiative themselves. And give you bonus gifts and sidequests and stuff, or maybe have a chance of doing a small favour for you. Like you wake up and a few squares of your farm are already watered or harvested, or one of your items has had its durability restored, or clues have been added on your map on how to find a new area. Or I dunno.. like... they cleaned your house or made you breakfast and you get a productivity boost from friendship joy. But yeah this randomness would be another way you could still receive old items without having to backtrack. Plus generally other anti-backtracking helpfulness! I think that as your level increases it should get easier to do your daily chores, so you have more time to do [insert whatever thing is currently plot important at this level]. Thats a big problem that makes it exhausting to continue playing farming games after a long time. Like.. the first time you run around the town giving people gifts its fun, but after doing a whole year of it it gets frustrating that it never gets easier or less required. Same for farming and backtrack-gathering, and even battling and exploring to some extent. if the way you do these things eventually started to get easier/change in how you do them, then they’d never get monotonous. Though that might just be a problem for me, I guess? I dunno if I’m weird but i find things more and more difficult the more I do them, routines are frustrating to me instead of easier. I have to find ways to always spice it up!

* Another idea of more ways to interact with characters beyond just giving gifts every day! Maybe have bonuses in certain areas every now and then? like, wake up one day and [character] is saying ‘the harvest in [area] is really good!’, and then if you go there you get a higher quantity of stuff, exp, and some cute friendship scenes with the charrie. Or maybe there’s too many [monster] in [area] and the harvest might actually become bad if you dont team up with [character] and exterminate them! And again, it’d become easier as you get higher levelled. At the beginning you’d pretty much be required to go for these events or else miss the chance, but later on if characters trust you a lot they could do it automatically on their own if you miss the event. So they continue gaining bonus exp even when you’re not travelling with them, you still gain (a slightly smaller amount of) the bonus item in your supply box, and really all you lost was a chance to raise more friendship points with them.

* Also maybe sometimes with regular quests/requests, a character could volunteer to help if they like you enough? Not for main story quests, with those you’d just have the character asking if they can join you for it. But with like... fred asks you for some chestnuts to make a cake for gerald, and mary calls you up to say ‘hey i heard about it, i had a big harvest of chestnuts today!’ And then you get friendship with all three of them, and save some time! And you can still refuse if you wanna do it yourself, that way you’d get bonus friendship with fred. cos like, he heard from mary that you said you wanted to handle the problem personally, and he was flattered. :3 (tho some characters would be different, maybe some would dislike it? i dunno)

* I really love that you can give cute hats to the batchelors and batchelorettes in RF4, and they wear them, and it is cute. This needs to be a thing in all games! I also like that the way its done is sorta easter eggy? Its not really explained as its own unique feaure, youre actually never told you can change party members’s equipment, which is a little bit annoying. But its also nice that its just like... “wow, the game’s much more open than I expected!” You can give gifts to characters and you wonder if you can give every single item, then HUH if you give them hats they actually wear them! And they can use all the same weapons you use! Awesome~ I also like that it seems like they have a chance of randomly wearing every hat you ever gave them? Whenever theyre in your party, they wear whatever equipment you last gave them, but when theyre wandering around the town they randomly wear their entire hat history. Thats so cute and makes them feel more alive! Itd be so neat if characters in these games could ‘remember’ stuff like that more often. Like I dunno... maybe the game logs down the first gift item you ever give each character, and then they bring it up during their final max-affection event. With different cute conversations depending on what it was! Like ‘omg wasnt it hilarious, I really hated it’ or ‘i cant believe you got my fave item on the first try!’ And then if its something of medium level like, maybe they say ‘i never really thought [item] was all that special, but ive become quite fond of it now it makes me remember you’. And i dunno, maybe at the ending the game could remember who you had in your party during every big story quest, and show a montage during the credits ^_^