P.S:
In case it wasn't obvious, try turning the music off and see if you can play it. :P

Right, well, one sheep, one cow, two chickens, and five hearts later...

The game indeed runs fine if I turn sound off. Though it's a little weird to play a Harvest Moon-clone to instrumental music and the Star Wars soundtracks in the background...

It does indeed seem like a real demo, and the music, when I allow it to play, is very nice (though I can understand how it might get old...such is the HM way, though).

So let me jump straight to ways to improve this thing for fourth release.

1. Polish tile based movement. You'll notice Verge3 only does it half-right: it doesn't move you according to a 16x16 tile grid: it literally moves you 16 pixels at a time. This means when a person blocks you, or you interrupt movement with a tool, or you walk up to a non-tile obstruction, you get offset off the basic tile grid, and all manner of ick ensues (there is nothing like being off the grid, planting some seeds, and realizing you just trashed a third of the bag). Or, trying to give a gift to a girl, only to have it fall right in front of you. Or trying to water a crop to your right, only to water the one up and left of you, etc, etc.

I see three ways to polish the movement.
--Make every obstruction a single 16x16 tile. No curved obstructions. On the odd objects like the "less than two tiles wide shipping box" (man...stupid less than two tiles) either add two tiles and have the player deal with it, or add one tile down the middle (like the much better blue shipping box in the barn).
--Make it so that using tools cannot interrupt the walking. When in the middle of a 16 pixel jump, pressing a tool button will interrupt it (and offset you later). Can you do a check on the tool button when pressed, that only performs the action when the player has stopped moving?
--Make all moving non-playing entities non-obstructable. It's fine if they're standing still, but moving is a real pain. Chasing a girl to give her a gift when she's walking away is almost impossible, because you can't walk up behind her (the bounding box stops you and she keeps going) and walking up in front of her is iffy at best (because she always walks right through you). Same with all livestock: they walk through me, but I have to maneuver deftly around them. Just turn all moving entity obstructions off: I don't mind walking right into the girl to give her the gift: it's very simple, and it will also keep me from off-setting myself on the tile grid (see above).

2. Is there any way to show an animation once I chuck an item away? Throwing a weed on the farm causes it to flash; but nothing else has this animation. Sometimes I don't know whether I've really tossed my cucumber onto the ground or in the box, and a "item falling to ground" animation for all objects would be good.

3. Is there any way to show when an item has successfully landed in the shipping box? Play one of those "clunk" sounds like in Back to Nature, etc. It's nice to know it's actually going in there.

4. On a related note to the moving entities above: could the cows stop moving once I milk them? :) I start the milking animation, and then he walks away, and I've got to repeat it two or three times.

5. I'm not sure if the livestock movement itself is buggy, but I've noticed that my chickens walk fine, but tend to gravitate toward the bottom of the chicken coop: and once they reach the bottom edge, they stay there, like zombies. Would it help to set a WanderZone/Rect to keep them from ...zombifying themselves on the edge of the map?

6. Sometimes, the clock will read 12:015, 4:015, 5:015, etc: it reads *:015 instead of *:15. Not sure why. Just thought I'd mention it...

7. There's this girl at the inn who never talks to me... is she real?

8. The library girl never seems to change her conversation, even by the time I hit five hearts :)

9. When rapidly alternating between D and C (to chuck as much stuff as possible into the shipping bin), instead of a throwing frame for the player sprite, he will switch to an "ax-swinging" frame. This happens every time; it's not random for me.

10. I noticed that the weeds randomly regrow themselves: that's really cool. What's _not_ cool is when they regrow themselves on top of my planted seeds. Maybe a check to get rid of that?

And, gameplay notes:

1. Could the sickle be used to destroy a crop? Sometimes I want to get rid of that extra cucumber...I didn't even water the thing, but it kept raining and I couldn't make it die.

2. Could the hammer be used to flatten tilled soil? Not really necessary to game functionality, but it'd be handy for keeping my field clean or undoing a mistake (from the bad tile-offsetting).

3. Could names be displayed for the character you're talking to? I oftentimes would like to know which girl I'm talking to, as I haven't memorized all the names.



It was very fun to power-farm near the end: on the very last week, every day consisted of gathering every Herb possible and tossing them into the library girl's arms, followed by excessive fishing. The gift shop is a nice touch.

I really like the demo; it was quite playable once I got past the music thing, and enjoyable the whole time. I don't mean to create a giant complaint list, either, as it was pretty intuitive to play; I only suggest, in particular, the tile-based movement glitches need to be remedied in some way, because they will annoy people, without doubt. [In fact, if it's impossible to iron those out, maybe consider going back to pixel-based, and having a small indicator on the current tile in front of the player when he's in the field (this could probably be done with a Zone-based function if needed)].

Stork. Heh :)

Omni, I love you. :D Seriously, your constructive criticism is always greatly appreciated.

Quote:

At least we've caught the culprit...now to figure out how to fix it.



Yes, I did notice this as well. It was actually the next issue I was going to tackle. I shall take your suggestions unto consideration, they're all good ideas and I'll probably end up using them.

A ha!

For those that care, I think I figured out the crashing bug.

Since I figured that music switching was causing the problem, I looked at the fmod.dll included with RR and an fmod.dll included with Amethyst, (among other v3 games and the official engine release), and I noticed that the fmod.dll in RR was 6 kb's smaller than the others.

How did this happen? Who knows! But upon replacing RR's fmod.dll with a different one the crashing seems to have stopped. I walked from the forest to the ranch 30 times, and proceeded to do the same for from ranch to town, and no crashes.

Obviously, something happened with fmod.dll, so replace it with the fmod.dll from the engine release and the crashing woes *should* be solved.

You brought up the weed thing in the last release, and I couldn't remember why I did that! But now I do! Cause it still happens from time to time:

Basically, if you're able to move when the weeds are doing their little flash thing, some times the weed just stays there instead of disappearing altogether. It also makes it so you can't pick up the weed anymore, and is stuck on your farm forever. So that's why I added that.

But I'm sure there's a better fix, so I'll add it to the list.

The other stuff: Well, the log-splitting thing was mentioned and should be no problem.

If I recall correctly, the original HM farm was the entire screen, (rocks could go anywhere) and then it became the "patch", or whatever. If it's different in the 3d versions, I'm completely unaware of it, because I only played those breifly. Some games are just meant for 2d.

I'm heavily baseing this on Friends of Mineral Town for the GBA, (far superior than the original in many, many ways) where the rocks and logs don't break on putting them on the grass. You just can't put them *anywhere* outside of your farm. What you *can* do, is throw them in the water and this is the approach I plan on taking later on.

Hey, didn't bother to read the entire thread but I have one bug to point out. At some point I was working the earth and picking up weed and at somepoint I gained a weed hat that follows me.(The weed is still floating on my head.)

I'm gonna try to recreate it...

Edit : Might as well make comments

So first thing... looks nice good work Rysen now stuff to say.

1.Too many buttons! Reduce the amount of them, make them more efficient, dunno, or place them in a way on the keyboard that makes it simpler.

2. There is a white dot o the upper right when the animation for earth working with plow happens when the farmer is doing it towards the right.

3. Make stuff grow faster... I waited a week with no change for my potatoes!

I can't recreate the weed hat thing... grrrr... anyway... keep up the good work

Rysen, I'll give you McFAIL for the button layer. I should just release that sucker. It's ready, really... but I got stuck on implementing a timestamped kewypress history with pattern recognition for fancy things like recognizing street-fighter-esque moves, so I put it off.