Continuing on from my last topic, what are some ways to keep recourse collecting interesting and fun?

Chopping down trees with a swinging accuracy button?

Whack a mole style fishing?

Other minigames? Automation? Hiring others to do it all? "Attacking" the recourse with an axe/pickaxe?

A great example would be Fable 2's gambling minigames. Let's face it, you need cash to buy better equipment, outfits, etc. Why not gamble for it? Sure, they had the *bleh* tree stump chopping & blacksmithing. But I'll be honest - I spent a good chunk of the game gambling my coin.

As a matter of fact, the mini-games were so well thought out that they were pre-released (I bought them) and you could incur quite a stash of cash (or debt if you weren't careful). They (Lionhead Studios) even incorporated things like debt to the lender into the game. They'd send people out after you to collect their dues.

I might turn that game back on tonight....

I think the ideal way to make resource collection fun is the make the win condition of whatever meta-mechanic you use, permanently upgrade the collection ability of the unit(s) involved. Either in quantity or creating a limited window of higher quality production (hinting at higher quality resources during that period) like a "production quality buff". Making some units incrementally superior.

You could do quest based resource transport where a base wide upgrade done by a distant structure could give a personal upgrade to a resource collection unit if the resources are brought from a specific location personally by one of the resource collection units to the structure used for the upgrade. Just a bit of micro control added to the automated process.

Does it need to be fun? Resource collection is in general a means to an end, and not an end in itself. It's something that you have to do, but not something that you want to put too much effort into doing. With it being such a repetitive task, there's no way around it eventually becoming boring. Most games just jump right past that eventuality, and try to make resource collection as unobtrusive and simple as possible.

It think it would be good to automate it, but also allow 'playing' it. Example: You hire fishermen to fish for you, and they do so at a fixed rate (with some random variance to keeps things interesting). Say: 1 fish per fishermen every 2 1/2 minutes.
But, you can go and fish yourself, which provided two benefits: You can catch more than one fish every 2 1/2 minutes (maybe 10 fish a minute), giving you instant-gratification when you need extra fish. Plus, it can be that you are "training" or "motivating" the fishermen, who are watching you fish. Depending on how you do (on a scale from -5 to +5), for the next 15 minutes after you 'showed' them, the Fishermen either fish better or worse (by adding your last results to their current fishing level), before gradually returning to their original 'Level 5' scale of fishing.

You can also upgrade fishermen by paying money for better equipment - So the Fisherman might be level 5 by default, but after fishing for 10 hours leveled up to level 6, but also you bought him a really good fishing pole which increases his level by 0.75, and a really sweet looking fishing hat, which increases a further 0.5 (making him level 7.25). Then, since you recently fished in his area, and you scored a +3.5 (on the -5 to +5 scale) in the fishing minigame, all the fishermen at that pond, including this Fisherman, gained +3.5 to their levels which wears off gradually over the next 15 minutes, and the Fisherman with the sweet hat is now temporarily level 10.75, making him fish you a fish every 1 minute, 20 seconds, instead of every 2 1/2 minutes.

I'd say that you treat it the same way people treat combat, although you may require a bit more ingenuity. Don't make minigames. Make actual games that you put into the main game.

[quote name='aattss' timestamp='1347222413' post='4978382']
I'd say that you treat it the same way people treat combat, although you may require a bit more ingenuity. Don't make minigames. Make actual games that you put into the main game.

Combat pretty much is a minigame. A minigame is just a part of the gameplay that has its own UI, control scheme, and possibly some measurements of score, time, ap/movementp/hp/magicp that aren't relevant to the main mode, which is usually the exploration mode.
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While what you said is true, and his wording was rather ambiguous, his point seems to be don't treat resource collection as self-contained and detached from the rest of the game, but make it thematically integrated with the rest of the game, in the same way combat is usually thematically integrated with the rest of the game. So don't have a serious dead-pan world and then toss in a cheery colorful fishing minigame that clashes with the rest of the game's theme and feels like a self-contained flash game found on the web was copy+pasted into your game.

I think its fine if it feels separate, so long as it isn't a requirement to the success of the game. Keep the original system of resource gathering, just add relevant perks to the resource collection mini-game you create. Ideally it would use much of the same control systems and UI as the basic game in order to the experience some continuity.