If ur making a Harvest Moon styled game (basically a farming dating sim) the absolute must haves imo are
Gotta make the animals fat. Thats the law. If they ain’t round as fuck then I’m going to be sad thru the whole game.
Gotta let me kiss anybody. If you ever truly want to 1-UP Harvest Moon in any valid way that’s absolutely one thing your game will always have over them. Let me kiss.
Make dating the characters fun. I won’t want to hold hands if I don’t care about them and ya can’t leave my hands cold like that bruh.
Make the characters interesting in general. I want to know more about them. Additionally, you can learn a lot about a character based off of their house alone. Bonus points for making up a unique system to get to know people.
Put weird shit in places. Do some weirdass shit. In Harvest Moon FoMT if you put gold lumber in your yard then the next morning everyone in town will call you a whore when you walk out of your house first thing in the morning–I loved that. If you click behind ur dog house you’ll find a black ball and it says “collect 9 for something special to happen 👀” which makes me as a player go absolutely buckwild. Sometimes in the game you have a 1 out of 700% chance of having dreams like fighting to the death with the girls in town. Do weird shit!!! It makes me play ur game for 3 days with no sleep trying to see more weird shit and I!!!! love it!!!!
Once again, if ur animals aint round enough to want 72 plushies of them then whats the point
During a dungeon, the DM snuck in a trapped room that made the party believe one of us was a doppelganger. The party consisted of a human monk, a half elf druid, a gnome sorcerer and a drow warlock. Only the human monk was effected but the trapped room split the parties ideals in two. The human was hallucinating and tried to fight the ‘fake’ party member he was seeing. He was effectively downed by the Gnome and tied up to stop him from hurting him.
The monk was tied up on the ground and kept shouting at the Sorcerer that he’s not the real one and tried to persuade others to join in. The party didn’t know what side to take so an argument broke out that left the druid exasperated. It went like this:
Druid: Guys, I think we should just leave..
Monk: Don’t listen to him! He’s a fake!!
Sorcerer: I can’t believe he attacked me.
Warlock, noticing the Monk nodding in a ‘go ahead’ gesture: What does that even mean? You know I can’t heal you right? What do you want me to do, this?
The warlock starts casting spells at the Sorcerer, but misses all of them with bad rolls. One spell hits him in return and effectively brings him to 0hp.
Warlock: Are you kidding m…
Druid: We should just leave the room
Sorcerer: Stop trying to kill me
Monk: Screw that, kill the Sorcerer
Druid: Guys… the room..
Warlock: I’m up for that. Kill the damn gnome
Eventually after arguing enough, the druid, being the only sensible one of the group, grabbed everyone and dragged them with her strength alone outside the room breaking the spell.
Druid: Told you to just leave the room
Monk (talking about the doppelganger): Where did the grey guy go?
