Quote:The part that really interests me is the experimental breeding of new shapes and colors of flowers, but the amount of time required to do that for real drives me crazy.
I know less about this or I would've brought it up too :( Plant Tycoon still really seems to gloss over this though -- it's more like "Oh hey here's a cactus that grows limes!" Basically some sort of underlying genetics model -- again a la Creatures -- could be helpful. You could have genes encoding for a lot of things -- color and growing point configurations among a bunch of things -- and then either manually choose what to crossbreed, or set up miniature, controlled "natural" selection environments.
Heck, you could even get something reasonably goal based here. "Cultivate a variety of oranges that is more cold resistant," or "Cultivate a variety of bananas that is more disease resistant/has high quality fruit", etc.
I've been trying out Runes of Magic over the holiday break, and I have to say I really dislike their implementation of planting. For anyone not familiar with the game, plants grow on a realtime meter, no pausing allowed. Plants require water and fertilizer which both cost game gold, the harvest from the plant is based on how close to the ideal point you keep both meters over the course of the plant's life, and if you let a meter run out a plant dies. For a level one pot, seed, and other materials, the plant will die if left unattended for approximately 24 hours. A plant which is watered and fertilized every 12 hours will produce a meager harvest worth less than the cost of the seed, water, and fertilizer. I am NOT going to get up in the middle of the night to water virtual plants, so I guess I won't find out if the payoff for taking care of them every 6 hours is actually profitable.
The irony of it amuses me though, I like pretty much everything about the game except the one that motivated me to try the game.
I want to help design a "sandpark" MMO. Optional interactive story with quests and deeply characterized NPCs, plus sandbox elements like player-craftable housing and lots of other crafting. If you are starting a design of this type, please PM me. I also love pet-breeding games.
The most interesting plant-growing mechanic I've encountered was in Ancient Domains of Mystery. The herbs in it grow and die according to Game of Life -type rules. So upon finding some random bunch of herbs in the world, the player can harvest them all immediately, or figure out a way to harvest them sustainably so that the resulting shape stays alive and produces some extra herbs which can (or frequently, must) be harvested every growth cycle. Naturally, there are much better and worse generator shapes, and you want to get from the random pattern to a good generator shape while not wasting any herbs you could have harvested. If you harvest into an unfixable shape, everything withers. Some initial patterns could, in theory, be unfixable to begin with, and then you should just harvest everything immediately.
