hey! this is really starting to shape up. i love how thorough and thoughtful your design is. the auto-scrolling log is also a great idea and it's cool to see options for clearing/minimizing it! blue UI + icons for the weapons is also a very RPG touch. i am also a little curious to see what you'll do with the narrative--i think one of the more fun parts about RPGs for me is making decisions and playing as a certain type of character--so maybe the player could decide how to interact with the farmer in some way that could affect resources or something? either way great work so far!!
Viewing post in [Devlog]+[Postmortem] old school "incremental" RPG
Thanks for the toughtful coments. That's a really good point about narrative and decisions.
At the moment I'm pretty tied down with just building the game systems (this turned out to be a lot more ambititous project than I realised), so the narrative will stay pretty linear for now. But in future I would like to have NPC interation as an important part of the game, and a few key decisions, including how to deal with the farmer (and spoiler alert: a bit of time-travel thrown in the mix !)
Was actually thinking to implement a Ultima-style "keyword" system eventually. Although unlike in Ultima, you do not type in words directly, instead, you would gather keywords as you progress, and then select them from a list when talking to NPCs. I loved Fallout, especially Fallout 2, in the level of choice it gave you when dealing with NPCs and quests... I remember one time, I needed an item from an NPC for a quest, but he wanted me to do his own annoying fetch quest. So I just said scre it, and pickpocketed the item from him instead, and went on my merry way. :D