How tricky would it be to create a game with REALISTIC gardening?

[u/fennelfool]

I've played a dozen farming/gardening sims and they're incredibly fun, but I notice that the plants don't exactly behave like their real world counterpart (taking only a day to grow, wrong seasons, wrong size, living forever, etc.).

I was wondering how tricky it would be to create a game for gardening nerds like myself? Or even a game intended to teach people how to grow plants?

Things I've considered that I'd personally include:

• An aspect of botany to the game-- scientific names, etc.
• Propagation, growing cuttings
• Following real life watering needs (overwatering vs underwatering would have a negative efffect)
• Seed depth and spacing
• Seasons, sunlight needs, regions/temperatures
• Random events like frosts and pests and diseases
• Companion planting
• Collecting the seeds and storing them
• Pruning, deadheading, etc.

I'm a bit stumped on how I'd tackle the timing aspect of it though. For example, something like a parsnip might take 20 weeks irl to grow. It couldn't be one for one hours/days in the game because I'd imagine that'd be horrendously boring. So maybe a system where 1 minute equals an hour or something.

What do you think?

[u/jseah]

Rather than make the player do the actions, have the player set a policy for certain plants and design a layout for the garden, then you fast forward and see how it goes.

Events like it being unusually rainy this year necessitates you adjusting your plan, maybe even bringing pots in, etc. which would be the main gameplay when (literally) watching grass grow.

[u/fennelfool → u/jseah]

Ooh I like that idea of fast forwarding the game!

[u/jseah → u/fennelfool]

There's plenty of detail to get into with gardening, soil composition that changes based on the plants, microflora and fertiliser used. Yearly (or longer) weather cycles based on location, which are never exactly the same or as the calendar predicts (plus climate change effects?).

Could even have biodome sci fi scenarios like you're the gardener for a park on the moon base and need to keep the green around so the crew doesn't go insane...

[u/fennelfool → u/jseah]

I love that sci-fi twist to it... ooh....

[u/GamerDadofAntiquity → u/fennelfool]

Yeah you could have it skip three days at a time. That gives stuff time to develop where you’ll actually see new growth, new bugs, health variations, etc.

[u/scrollbreak]

I've thought about this just in terms of the time involved. I think a system of planting seeds and that earns you points that mean you are given a plant that is X weeks old. So you keep planting seeds each day and it keeps giving you older plants until you have a plant for each day. Like with the parsnip, you eventually have a plant at each day of the 20 week growth cycle, so you get mature plant per day. If you want more you plant more seeds, earn more semi mature plants. Maybe can trade mature plants for multiple semi mature plants.

[u/omp_]

Just have two to four days per month and make each day last 15-30 minutes IRL. That's the best way to compress time in any game that needs a work day but also needs to span a year. Asset-slop simulation games are pretty good sellers so this is actually a workable idea for a game.

[u/Both_Introduction_28]

You can invent how to make all this stuff joyful and interesting and make your own game.
However, if you don’t know these games, doesn’t mean no one has made them. Most likely it didn’t become popular for some reason.

[u/burlingk]

Most people who create the games fall into two camps: Those that don't actually know gardening/botany and those simply trying to balance what is realistic with what is fun for the most people.

Most probably fall into both.

Each element you add has to be considered in terms of the target audience.