Update 3: Automation
Things are shaping up, there's an interface and you can click things and gather stuff! But more importantly: automation.
As mentioned in my last post, an extra story stage was added. Once you have completed the first round of upgrades (a bigger wheat basket, better scythe and better axe) a stranger stumbles into the farm and becomes a worker. You can assign and unassign the worker to wheat or wood collection, automating it at a default rate of 1 unit per second. Nothing else exciting, but hey, a key feature in any incremental.
Eventually you'll have a team of workers, and managing their assignment will become important. Things like skill levels for workers (so the more a worker chops wood, for example, the better they get at it) would be awesome but I have to keep it simple for now.
The very first iteration
The next iteration, looking slightly less terrible
I also added a "talk to farmer" button, which for now serves no real purpose but adds extra flavour in the form of random gossip-like messages. Later, I'd probably expand this to include other NPCs that you can talk to. I want NPCs to play a bigger role in this game than typical incrementals, but for now they'll mostly be story/quest givers. Trading and challenging people to duels would be great, but that'd be post-jam stuff.
Narrative versus Gameplay
The biggest obstacle is surprisingly not the programming. The internet is so awesome that I can pretty much always ask "how to make a div disappear" or something and I have the answer and code examples at the tip of my fingers. No, the challenge is actually... the narrative.
Story-telling sits in odds with everything else, because as far as the computer is concerned it entails having to arbitrarily activate and deactivate elements for no good reason. Someone tested the first stage and within seconds already clicked a button instead of continuing a story dialogue box, breaking the game!
Anticipating these moves in order to prohibit them is one approach but finding a cleaner method is probably better. I created a scrolling dialogue box with updates appearing more like a log, so the player can keep playing without accidentally skipping or circumventing narrative. Possibly, key text can appear "pinned" at the top, or something, to easily remind you what stage of the game you are at and your current main objective. This will fit into the incremental style gameplay better.
I'd still like to have classic RPG style dialogue boxes, game interrupting dialogue boxes could work for events like major conversations between characters, as well as direct narration, but for now I have just implemented the simpler "message log" system.
Next Steps
I really need to start optimising the code now that things are coming together - using objects instead of variables and putting more stuff in functions instead of manually coding each step in slightly different variations for each resource, etc. This will be a big test since I am not a coder.
I'll also add the exploration feature back in - to find the cave, and unlock stone and iron ore, and exploration until the dungeon is found. I won't step into the adventurer stage yet.
I think just one or two more updates, then I can post a working prototype as well.