Update 2: First Steps
Since the last post, some pretty decent progress was made (considering my lack of coding background). The game already has some fundamental steps: gathering some resources, exchanging them for money, and a few upgrades. A basic interface is in place, which will be hopefully much-improved later but is already perfectly serviceable.
Story so far
The current state of the game sets you out as an orphan, taken in by a poor farmer. You do some work for him/her gathering up wheat (and later, wood) in exchange for meagre money. You can also upgrade your scythe (increase wheat harvested per click), basket (increase maximum wheat capacity) and axe (increase wood chopped per click). These different things are introduced in steps, but once you reach the furthest stage you can gather and upgrade indefinitely, for now. I added a future step, which is not yet accessible in the current build, where you decide to "explore" the field further, and eventually discover an old cave. Explore that, and it becomes identified as an abandoned mine. That will open up new resources, and eventually the dungeon.
UI
The UI is barebones simple, but works well enough, and displays more elements as the game progresses. My favourite little addition was tooltips, which pop up above the element and are fully formattable in HTML:
I want the game to give the player a lot of information, especially for income and outgoings, so that mousing over a resource will show a breakdown of your income and consumption, where it comes from and any bonuses applied. The player should be able to see what is causing any deficiencies and can more easily choose how to address them.
Game Design reflection
Aside from the practical progress, putting the first steps into practice were helpful at already making me reflect on my design goals.
Initially, I wanted the adventuring aspect to happen quickly. The game introduced resource collection and depositing by having you collect 20 wheat before telling you to deposit it with the farmer. From there, it immediately jumped to exploring the fields for the cave, then exploring the cave itself. I realised this would mean introducing the player to the gathering aspect and then immediately disregarding it. Making the first part of the game a meaningless exercise in clicking to get through some screens.
Instead, if we're going to introduce gathering, it needs to then serve a purpose and the player needs to have a period where they take what they just learned and achieve some goal with it, and also get the chance to upgrade stuff. The challenge is fitting this into the narrative - you are helping an old farmer out, there needs to be enough freedom to explore gathering but you shouldn't be building 20 flour mills and 15 lumberjack huts at this stage. After some experimention, my idea is to have a few gathering iterations, introducing a new resource, and a few upgrades. Once you've gathered a certain amount, someone will wander to the farm, inured and alone, looking for refuge. The farmer will ask you to designate tasks for this new worker - in other words, automating wood or wheat collection. Soon, another wanderer will stagger in, looking for refuge.
This approach is handy as it will go through the usual mechanics, while fitting with the early stage narrative and hint at some sort of background events, before introducing a new mechanic.
Once you've got a flow with some workers, since you will have more time on your hands, it will come time to explore the field as initially designed. Instead of going straight to exploring the cave to find the dungeon, though, I will have a similar loop of acquiring new resources, in this case, stone and maybe iron ore, that the farmer will want you to extract to sell and upgrade the farm, making life better for everyone. Hints will suggest some sort of war, prompting why we need the farm to be upgraded to become a source of refuge.
At some point, freed up by the workers, you will explore the cave further, revealing the dungeon. From here, the iron ore and wood can be used to create makeshift weapons, spears, clubs, etc., enabling basic progress and opening up the first combat. After completing the first section of the dungeon, you'll realise deeper is too dangerous without getting proper adventurers, and the first phase of the game is complete.
As you can see, the first phase then is basically a tutorial. You will learn to gather resources, allocate workers, upgrade tools and the farm, craft equipment and fight monsters. All the fundamental basics with which to play the rest of the game. The second phase will lead into the adventurer hiring/training/management aspect. Once you've learnt that part, the game will become more open-world.
Future Design Challenges
An interesting challenge is the inclusion of yourself as a character, as well as overseeing other characters (workers). Usually incrementals tend to be one or the other, not both. I can see why, as my current system will create questions.
Currently, upgrading things like axe and scythe mean upgrading the one you are using. Once you get workers, they technically should have different tools to you. Different approaches like automatically applying your own upgrades to new workers doesn't really make sense, but upgrading each worker's equipment independently would become cumbersome. Specifying each upgrade as a broad "improving the scythes used on the farm" upgrade can work, but also has some plausibility problems - if you have 2 workers and then pay the set amount to upgrade all the tools you use in general, it shouldn't apply to new then new workers arriving after the upgrade, as they would then also require new tools. Classic RTS games like Warcraft 1, 2 & 3 simply ignored this and existing units magically got upgrades.
Technically, though, each new worker attracts additional cost when they arrive, to equip them with the latest tools to match the current upgrade, but that runs back into cumbersome territory. So I'm not sure how to get around that one.
I also have the narrative question of when to get rid of the farmer. At the moment, you get paid by the farmer, and collect wheat and wood for him. At some point you need to be independent. I will probably make monsters escape the cave and eat him/her, which is grisly but raises the stakes, I suppose. Otherwise, they may pass away peacefully from old age. In any case, early on you will end up with the farm, and the farmer will leave you with various cryptic clues hinting at background events.
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There's a lot of work to go, but I'm happy with the start!