The Harvest is a 2D role playing game where you take on the role of Marigold and defeat vicious creatures with her blood. It takes place in a lush, forbidden forest beset by danger.
- Project Length: 2 months
- Responsibilities: End-to-end development. Narrative, combat and level design, creative direction, narrative, world building, itemization
- Team Size: 1 / Solo
- Runtime: Approximately 1.5h
- Engine and Tools: RPG Maker MV, Miro, Google Docs & Sheets
The Goal
The Harvest comes from a personal place of desire to learn and grow. I was laid off from my job as a producer and wanted to use the opportunity to explore game design. In building The Harvest, I set out to hit these targets:
- Create something different
- Make a complete experience
- Make something I liked
- Limit scope to tighten focus and increase likelihood of completion
- See if I like designing games! (The answer is: Yes!)
Scope
- I decided to use exclusively default assets to minimize time, cost & give myself limitations.
- I prioritized learning how to structure events and build levels as establishing a frame of understanding for those felt most transferable.
- For scripting behaviors that did not come out-of-the-box, I looked for plugins.
- I aimed for a 2-3h playable experience that I ultimately trimmed to 1.5h to have a finished “Act 1” version playable with a good stopping point.
Tools
RPG Maker MV: I chose this because while I love playing all kinds of games, I am a lifelong lover of RPGs (ex. Persona, Final Fantasy, Dark Souls, Pokémon). The tool has been around for years and has a bounty of resources!
Overall I felt this would have the least friction at an entry level to determine if I enjoyed designing games. I love learning and am confident that I can learn engines as needed!
Miro: Board Link (recommend opening in new tab. Warning: unfiltered brain dump)
Player Experience
The player controls Marigold and her trusted partner, Poppy. Marigold is a girl on the cusp of adulthood, and has a serious role to play in the lifecycle of her community. Her gift of potent, magical blood allows her to both harm and heal; this is key to the Harvest.
The player will experience a narrative roleplaying game driven by tactical combat. They will explore a dark, lush forest and start to unravel the hidden truth behind the Harvest through a mixture of direct and indirect storytelling.
The Verdict?
The game is not perfect by any means. There are some rough edges and signs of my overcramming (to learn) but it is complete (for now). I did what I set out to do and I loved it.
Known Design Issues:
- There is too much cognitive burden around Marigold’s HP breakpoint kit.
- It gives the impression of being complicated. Core conceit can be condensed into half or less the amount of things and still have the same impact.
- Poppy’s kit is a little bloated.
- This is partly a product of overcramming to get the most design mileage. Could consider adding another character to spread the kit OR, on revisiting the project to add subsequent acts, I could lengthen the time between getting abilities. This would mean rebalancing fights.
- Items are fine but not great.
- I’d like to increase usage of them in a way that players will find fun. A common behavior in RPGs is to horde items ‘in case I might need them for a hard fight’. I don’t want to fight that necessarily, but I think I can get closer to having items be more compelling.
- Also rename ‘Blood Cartridge’. I deliberately did not call the blood ‘blood’. Players reading the word ‘blood’ for potentially the first time in-game incidentally is not as impactful as a designed moment where the word is deliberately used for an effect.
- Players cannot enter the mine once they encounter a familiar face.
- This isn’t terrible but it is unintentional. Could be addressed by a simple ‘we should make sure we’ve done what we wanted’ type callout.
This was tremendous fun. Pleased with what I’ve accomplished in the time and grateful I could do it. Onward!
Elhora Davis Game Design 