Come Farm With Us!
The first Alpha Season of My Neighbor Alice introduced fishing to the neighborhood. At the time we sat down with Game Designer Robin in order to get a feel for what the feature would look like prior to the launch of the season. Robin is back and he is joined by his partner-in-crime Andreea as they explain how they went about crafting the first iteration of a most anticipated feature: Farming!
Read on to learn more about it, as well as traditional Swedish apple heists and drunken mooses.
Farming in My Neighbor Alice
Here is the tl;dr — in Season Two, Neighbors will be able to exchange the fish they catch for seeds. They will grow plants from those seeds, and the plants will in turn yield material that can later be used to manufacture more advanced materials and objects. The unique resource ecosystem of My Neighbor Alice will be implemented throughout the game and we hope this will bring an element of magical discovery to the overall gameplay.
According to Andreea and Robin, one of the features that make farming truly unique in My Neighbor Alice are the fact that the farming yields are whimsical. Our farmers won’t stand idle by their plot of land, waiting for the old corn or carrot to break through the earth. Instead, we will get fruit trees bearing little bells or corks, pumpkins made of stone, sticky leaves of glue or even plants made of cloth so that you can harvest them and directly sew a tunic with your yield. One of the most fantastic elements will be plants from which Neighbors will be able to harvest light. It’s fair to say that our plants and resources will carry equally unique names. In Season 2, you probably won’t be able to use the yields to create other objects but you’ll be able to farm about 40% of the resources we have designed so far. In time, collaboration will also become a part of farming much like it is IRL. For now, one of the cool smaller scale collaborative elements of farming is that players can plant their crops into the same piece of land, thus merging them into a bigger plant… and if one of those plants was originally growing into fertile soil it makes the entire piece of soil fertile. Just know that farming in My Neighbor Alice is in good hands and with your help, it will keep growing until it’s ready to bloom.
Pumpkins, apples and drunken mooses
Now, let us give you some insight into how Game Design works. You see, many Game Designers like to bring elements of their upbringing into the games they work on. It has never been truer than Robin & My Neighbor Alice. See, he grew up on a small farm in a charming fishing village of Skåne on the Southern coast of Sweden. He got to spend countless hours fishing with a passionate father who made his own lures. It is the reason why Fishing was so fun in Season One and why it will (hopefully) keep on getting better from there. When Robin was a child, he used to farm pumpkins that he would sell at the local market, using all his hard earned cash to buy Swedish candy [Editor’s note: if you have never tried salt liquorice you are missing out.]. Every fall, Robin and the boys from the village would scour private gardens to steal all the apples they could find. It sounds very illegal but this is actually a Swedish tradition called “palla”: kids steal as many apples as possible as a form of community quest. This is what inspired this idea of everyone contributing to growing a pile of boxes to build something together. It’s not about how many apples one steals but how many the band can gather. Robin and co. would then put all the apples into a cart-wheel and feed them to the forest mooses. Which led to an incident where a moose having eaten one-too-many fermented apples got drunk and managed to get stuck on a tree which had to be cut-down.
See you in the neighborhood !
About My Neighbor Alice
My Neighbor Alice is a social online game with focus on resource gathering, crafting and creative expression. Players build their own virtual lands, interact with neighbors, perform exciting daily activities and earn rewards along the way.
Join Alice’s Channels:
· Discord
· Telegram
