Hello /ideaguy/. I have an idea for a game and I pretty much know what I want to make but I'm having trouble deciding whether or not to use an engine like Game Maker or to lrn2code, not to mention if I should try doing my own spritework (I'm no artist).
The game is going to be a farming simulator a la Harvest Moon. I've always loved the Harvest Moon games but I often felt they were too shallow, so I really want to add a bit more depth to the game, especially to the farming. I thought maybe toying with an actual plot for a change might be cool too so I'm drafting up a mystery plot.
Long story short The Boy receives a letter in the mail addressed to him by his father, written seven years ago, which contains a copy of the deed to his farm. The Boy travels to Garner Village to take a look and quickly learns from the mayor that the farm is involved in a giant legal mess; nobody owns the land and merely stepping on the property is grounds for an immediate arrest. The Boy tries to explain the situation when The Snob shows up, announcing that his mother left him the farm in her will (no they're not long-lost brothers). County officials are called in and decide upon the Homestead Solution: whoever can prove they deserve the farm will get to keep it. In the meantime the farm is yours to use, but you have only three years to build it up or else you'll have to surrender the farm.
You can end the main plot in one of two ways. One, the Homestead Solution: make the farm great. The other way involves a mystery plot revealing that The Snob's mother coerced your father into marrying her late into his life so she could take the farm when he dies. The passing of ownership from husband to wife is deemed illegitimate and you can keep the farm.
In order to differentiate the game from Harvest Moon proper (perhaps I'll sell it somewhere down the road) I want the complexity and customizability of your farm to really stand out. Many of the later games offer a lot of content and customization but there's usually not enough depth to it. There's frequently not a lot of crops, and the only thing that can be grown year-round is usually grass. I don't believe there's ever been wheat, sugar cane, or anything like that (I know there was rice once). Moreover animals are usually as simple as talk, brush, milk/shear. I don't have the ideas fully fleshed out but certainly there's more to raising an animal than that! There's also never much encouragement to raise your animals to be sold (as grim as the implications may be). For this reason pigs have never really been featured much in-game.
Usually your only three diversions are chatting with townsfolk, fishing, and mining (maybe foraging if you count that). Never in any Harvest Moon game have you been able to hunt, and I think the ability to visit a hunting grounds and blow a deer's head off might be a nice change of pace.
Weather would also play a bigger part, with increased weather patterns as opposed to sun, rain, hellstorm. Different degrees of rain and windy weather would have an impact on your crops and on hunting, fishing, and mining.
Now all of that said, I have never developed a game and have no idea where to start. Obviously trying to do everything above on my own would be ridiculously ambitious, and probably way too much for a beginner simpleton like myself. Even if I were to legitimately start working on all of this I would be overwhelmed after like a month. I want to start small, like replicating Harvest Moon SNES, which I think is feasible; if I could start there I would at least have the confidence to get myself started proper and all I would really have to do is add to the game from there.
So, in short, if you were to attempt to recreate Spring from Harvest Moon on the SNES from scratch, what do you think would be the simplest way to do it?