Harvest Sprites

In his DICE speech, Todd Howard started talking about the design cycle of Bethesda games, and an interesting bit of info came up.

He talked about the Learn -> Play -> Challenge -> Reward/Surprise cycle. So I wanted to analyze my game against this cycle, and found out that this game fits very well (from my initial design).

So, I'll start by listing the basic baseline idea of this game.

Baseline:
You play as a young adult who must sow crops and grow his influence to many people in order to appease the harvest sprites for a shot at a wish, a wish the protagonist has always wanted to make as a child.

Learn Cycle:
You must learn how to use your tools, sow a crop, raise animals. You must learn what people like and dislike, and you must learn how you may appease the harvest sprites. There's a lot of learning involved.

Play Cycle:
You use your tools for fun, such as fishing or for leisure. You can give things to people and see how they react, and learning secrets from people and other random events can be fun. There are also fun public events the player can attend. Or you might just want to explore all of the nooks and crannies of each map.

Challenge Cycle:
You can decide to take on more crops and animals. You may want to get serious about a relationship with someone who might be interested in someone else. There's puzzle solving when it comes to the harvest sprites and some of the tasks they may want you to do. Some public events can be challenging, such as races or games.

Reward/Surprise Cycle:
Your hard farm work pays off - literally! You're courtship may turn into marriage, and appeasing a harvest sprite gives you more stamina/abilities.

Why these cycle:
Once you get more stamina you may choose to use it to play more. You can play as a way of blowing off steam from a challenge. You may need to learn new tools or learn how to take your marriage farther (children). And rewards compel you to try new things and do new things to earn more of them. Challenge compels you to finish it, lose a race one year means you'll try harder next time.

Therefore this game has all of the right gameplay elements to keep you hooked. Some may be borrowed from Harvest Moon and/or Rune Factory, but that's just a fact of life in a post modern world.

I encourage people to try this analysis on their games, in order to see if their game is worth playing. I also hope you found some interest in this game after reading the basic outline of this games gameplay.

Now I need to start making stuff.