Another month down, this one with some significant progress which was long overdue. If you’re new to these sorts of posts I make them at the end of the month (and usually miss posting them by a day because something inevitably comes up to prevent me from writing them).

As anyone who has played Verdant Village recently will probably know V0.4 and two hotfixes have been released this month, ending a very long patch drought. I’ve mentioned it before, but that was mostly due to getting caught up on art and SFX assets. If you’re looking for the details on those patches you can check the three previous posts to find what has changed. I do want to say thanks to everyone who has played (and dealt with bugs) I appreciate everyone sticking with the game for so long and any post patch rough spots that I tend to create.

Patch aside, I’d rather move into what’s to come, because of course there is still a lot to add to Verdant Village. Before anything major, I am working on another hotfix issue to tie up a few lingering issues. Most notably, using the bow to hunt will still lock up and there are some controller support issues. Assuming I don’t run into any large problems, that hotfix will hopefully be here before the end of the week.

As for the future, the next content patch that I had planned was combat. It’s something that’s been long overdue and should add a significant chunk of gameplay and resource gathering loops to keep players occupied. There are several other small systems and additions that will likely go along with this as well. I don’t expect this will take nearly as long as it did for patch 0.4 to come out as its far more focused, but time will tell. Regardless, I’ll talk more about combat in the near future I’m sure.

The other thing I wanted to address was something that has been nagging at me for a long time. A few posts recently have forced me to consider it more fully once again. Game dev is constant reassessment of what you are making after all. The issue is that of the size of the world in Verdant Village. There have been a few mentions of it being too large, empty, etc. Of course I expected some of these comments because the game is in early access and not everything is filled in. However, over the course of development, goals and systems have changed. Things that I thought would be added have either been scraped in place of other systems or merged with other things.

This leaves me in something of an odd state. To give some perspective, my original reason for having a large world was due to my playing Harvest Moon FoMT. I’d imagine at this point most people would think I based this game off of Stardew Valley and while it certainly played a part in shaping the game, I’ve always considered Harvest Moon to be what I was basing this game off of. I bring this up because HM FoMT had a fairly small world, it was for the GBA after all. If I recall correctly, it was your farm, a town with a beach, and some nature south of your farm, that’s it. I wanted a larger world because, when I was a kid, I always wanted to explore more, but the game didn’t really allow for it. Exploration wasn’t really the point of the game outside of the secrets here and there.

When I started making Verdant Village this was something I wanted to achieve. However, as time passed and I got further into making this game I realized that having vast areas to explore presented two problems. One, usually players have to check back into their farm each day to water crops, feed animals, etc. This means lots of back and forth. And two, the point of the game. To keep it simple, farming sims are mostly about, well, farming, raising livestock, building your farm. There are of course some other systems, fishing, hunting, mining, etc, but none of these really require a massive map. You really just need one place to go and do them as the systems themselves aren’t really complex enough to warrant doing them in multiple places. I.E. picking berries in the fields or the woods is essentially the same thing.

The nature in these games needs to be there, but this isn’t Minecraft. You can only interact with a limited number of things so a massive world ends up being a lot of set dressing for no real purpose. Pretty landscapes can of course be cool and fun to run around in, ala Skyrim, but I think we can all agree that this doesn’t have the visual fidelity of Skyrim. I’d imagine that the people who have put significant time into this game would agree that they spend plenty of time just walking because while the zones are large there isn’t anything to keep you there.

Of course, one obvious solution is to fill the wilderness with interesting things. The problem with this twofold. If the point of the game is to build your farm up, the most valuable things should only be attainable at that farm, bar something like the occasion secret. It wouldn’t make sense to put tons of effort and time into your farm only to walk into the field nearby and pick some berries that sell for more than anything your gone to the effort of making. This naturally makes the wilderness less enticing as the rewards shouldn’t ever really outshine your farm. They should be a small reward for going out of your way if anything. Or things that are more important at the start when you haven’t built up your farm yet.

The second problem is a system problem. By their nature, these types of games have simple gameplay. I don’t think any of us play these games for the fast-paced complex gameplay of something like Street Fighter or Starcraft. Building your farm is a long form gameplay loop. Over a long period of time, you get little bits of growth that keep you invested. Gameplay in the wilderness usually amounts to see thing, pick up thing. That isn’t super interesting. I could fill everything with minigames, grabbing pearls from oysters in the grotto is an example of this. That said, I’d be willing to bet this would just devolve into tedium when you have to play the 500th minigame to pick up a flower.

Together what these issues mean is that there a lot of little reasons that meld together to make large empty maps boring. The solution of course would be putting in content. The problem is that, due to the nature of these games, the content that would be added would likely be shallow and not hold most people’s interest unless they had to do it. Not to mention the rewards for completing such content likely wouldn’t be worth it.

I’ve gone on this…rant? Tangent? Explanation? To hopefully give some perspective to those who maybe haven’t considered this. I don’t like to jump to change things when just a few people make a comment. Not that it isn’t a potentially good idea, but I’d be crazy to make drastic modifications to the game each time someone mentioned changing something.

However, in this situation I can see the logic. As I said this is something that has nagged at me, for the lack of a better term, for a while. I ignored it because I thought there were future plans that would compensate for the problem. The more I examine the scope of the game however the more I think that the solutions, while they might mitigate part of the problem, would really not do enough to solve it.

I’ve taken all this time to say this, while it isn’t set in stone, I’m considering shrinking the world some. When making this game I don’t think I stopped to consider the design philosophy of a larger world and what it would mean. I thought a larger world would automatically be better. But the phrase, “size of an ocean, depth of a puddle” comes to mind. It seems that, with the other elements and general gameplay loop set, a larger world only serves to spread out the entertaining bits and force you to walk long distances. The travel time is a gameplay equivalent of a sputtering engine, where you have to pause the fun to run somewhere every two minutes.

So, I bet you thought, “he just put out a patch, he probably won’t have much to say in this update” but here we are. The question I’d like to ask is, what do you all think? Early Access is made for feedback and iteration after all. Maybe I’m completely wrong and most people like the size of the map. But I’d like to see where we stand so I can hopefully make improvements.

I feel I should also specify. If I were to shrink the map it would mostly amount to squeezing a lot of areas together and shrinking the size. I don’t think I’d cut anything from the game, just downsize the play area and probably combine some zones so that the interesting bits are more packed together. I think that’s it, if you’d like to give me your opinion, I’d be happy to hear it. I’ll also be posing this question in the discord so if you’d rather answer there, I’ll be watching it as well. I hope patch 0.4 has given you all some enjoyment, there will be more to come in the future, with any luck a lot more quickly than before.