No progress lately. Been taking time off, but I will return shortly with a bit more motivation to get things done. No, today's title is not my game. It's related, though, and I wanted to mention it eventually as it's one of many modicums of inspiration for this project: an ancient flash-based farming game. This is one of the few exceedingly rare semi-quality images that still linger online. It was poorly named "Free Farm Game", a title which not only may have contributed to its fade into oblivion but also one that makes unearthing figments of its history nearly completely impossible. Just go look up "free farm game" and see for yourself.
As far as I know, it originated some time in the Farmville era of browser games. I only remember ever playing it once, which was many years ago, and I only played it for one or two sessions before giving up on it. A little more recently, however, I remembered vague memories of the gameplay and wanted to try it once more only to find the servers had gone down in the last few years and the entire site/links in the last few months. The only lasting proof of its existence is its still-present Facebook page. The game itself is pertinent because--while I didn't play a ton of it--it has occupied my mind often during the creation of my own game and before. My memory is faint (and only one hardly-legible two-minute video of gameplay exists online), but I remember it having an approach unlike any other farming game. They even mention it on the aforementioned Facebook page: "Tired of those childish and unchallenging farm games?" The game had intelligence. Your usual farm game is hyper-casual--extremely laid-back, easygoing, and low-level. But this ostracizes the opposite end of the spectrum: the weirdos like me who play games like Factorio and have fun playing them to think and not relax. "Free Farm Game" was unlike any other farm game I had seen. It had complexities, detail, and realism. It wasn't your usual "plant, wait, harvest"--you had to consider temperature, growing time, disease, insects, and (if I recall correctly) even things like market fluctuations and seasonal shifts. It was the only farming game in existence where you genuinely had to think to play it, and not everything was as easy or casual as the farming genre today. Alas, woe is me. I missed my window to play it and its history is virtually nonexistent, so I have no access to a view of its systems or mechanics that I remember so fondly yet faintly. All I can do is draw from assumptions and my limited memory to let it inspire my own game, as limited as that may be. Though, what I remember from it has given me a lot of ideas and iteration to work with, and I am determined to make not only a worthy pseudo-successor, but something that may expand further into uncharted territory. I understand that in the context of genres, "farming" isn't the most popular. "Clicker" is even more niche, and "RTS" is only holding on because of StarCraft 2 (which is more than a decade old). Combining the three is almost cursing myself, but great game concepts often come from new, unexpected combinations. And while first and foremost I am making the game for myself, I know I am not the only one who might like to see a "hard" farming game or an agriculture RTS or an incremental game that isn't about AFKing. I just have to see it through. |