Herba and the Song of Spring

Hi all!
It's not often that I do blogs but I've been focussed on Herba quite a lot lately and I feel like I should probably talk about my dev processes in order to actually continue devving so that's what I'm going to do! Today I'm going to talk a bit about the gameplay that I've planned for Herba and how it will work.

Herba and the Song of Spring is not an RPG in the normal sense. There's no battles, and not really much in the way of puzzles. The main aspect of the game is collecting ingredients, crafting items, filling requests and following the story to one of its' conclusions (of which there will be at least 3-4). I estimate that the game will probably be about 2 hours long, tops, for one play-through. Maybe.

The main gameplay will focus on the crafting and collection of ingredients. I've worked hard on making a cute little system for collecting ingredients and edited a script to fit with my desire when it comes to the crafting side of things.

So let's talk collection.

Basically, I created an event that will know when you're in a collection spot and change your sprite to indicate that by shoving a yellow ! above your head. This becomes your prompt to collect items, which are given based on what you can see on the map in that specific spot. For example, if you're in an area where there are yellow flowers and lots of long grass clumps you'll find only Feverfew flowers and Stringstem herbs.

The amount of items you find is randomised, so it is likely that you might find nothing pickable within that batch, however the likelihood of that is quite low and you can always check again the next day to see if your luck changes.



At the moment I'm thinking that the amounts are a little too high for some of the items, but I can easily balance that by requiring more of them to make stuff or making them the most common ingredients. So, yeah, I'm not too worried with inundating players with too many of x and not enough of z.

I'm enjoying the challenge of working on gameplay before touching the story, and I've almost finished the mountain maps. Currently there are three areas you can go to harvest from and it will be a case of 'should I spend my time at the mountain, marsh or forest'?

You only have so much time (and there will be a time system to count down the days) before the game ends and the story closes. I've yet to actually make said time system but it'll probably replace the aurora effect I had going on with tints.



I've still got a long way to go. I've yet to finish all the gathering spots, since I need to make some new graphics for them, and of course not all the maps are complete yet... but I think I've made some decent headway.

^.^)b