A Fresh Harvest ( Moo-Moo Manor Devlog #3) (Patreon)

hi!  it's been a little while.  i hope i haven't kept you waiting for too long

among other things, for the past month or so, i've been largely occupied with the building of my very first desktop computer, which i've been able to afford in no small part thanks to all of you pledged to this patreon page!  this allows me to do things i never would've been capable of before, like easily being able to record full HD videos of the game without having to film 20 different retakes to avoid stuttering.  it has made the development process and my general quality of life all sorts of easier, and for that, you have my endless gratitude.

speaking of videos of the game, here's a brand new one:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=avLll1noanY

as you can probably tell, this is the beginning of a farming system!  the aim of this system is two-fold:

1.  adding more depth to the market system, and allow players to combine produce (likely through an extremely simple crafting system) to make wholly new products

2. just generally giving the player more to do in their downtime

the biggest issue with the game, as i see it right now, is just a lack of stuff to do while waiting for those cows to embiggen.  the main draw of the game is unquestionably helping big cows get bigger, but it'd be pretty hard to justify making this a management game instead of, i don't know, a series of static animations if there's no meaningful agency on the player's behalf outside of when to click the milk button and where to place their furniture.

however, adding too much to do runs the risk of alienating folks that are largely there just to see animations of cows expanding.  so my current modus operandi is largely one of trying to add secondary game loops until the game is at a point where complete down time is minimized to effectively nothing if the player wants to really milk (wink) everything they can out of this game, but also, making sure that these additional mechanics are not at all a requirement to enjoy the game.  in addition, each new substantial mechanic that i add will likely increase the overall time it takes to add content substantially, making the parts of the game that people actually want (new characters, minigames, animations, etc) to take longer to add, since it all needs to be implemented in a way that works with every other mechanic.

i've got a pretty good idea of how i want to manage this already, but i'm pretty curious to hear y'all's takes on this/whether you'd prefer the focus to be things like dialog and more in-depth market mechanics in favor of maybe less characters/more overall time spent on each character.  let me know!  the feedback is always appreciated.

yet again, thank you so much for your support!  it means the world to me.

-cozy