Time to Unveil Our New Project!

We're a little over two weeks since the announcement of Project Oni's rework/cancellation and it's finally time to share some info for our next project. While we’re coming up with a name for this game, we'll be calling it Project Dream Farm.

Here’s a synopsis we’ve written up:

Player has always had strange visions of her future, which to date, have never failed to come true. At times, the visions are simple enough. It’s going to rain two weeks from now. There’s going to be a cat crossing the road near the market…

But one day, there’s something abnormal. Something unsettling. There’s a girl with hollow eyes asking for help. Her silhouette obscured by what appears to be a forest with thick mist.

“Help us... Erase-… Come to our world and give us your aid… Guide the lost ones.”

There’s never been a vision that speaks, what could this one mean? For some reason, player sees herself in an unfamiliar town.

After many restless nights spent dreaming about the mysterious girl shrouded by mist, Player decides to investigate the location where the voice seems to be calling from.

As she walks towards the voice, her senses begin to go numb. All she can focus on is the words echoing in her head.

“The vale. Help restore-... 

The cryptic message makes no sense to her. Yet it inspires intense emotions. She must start a new life. Find answers about the mysterious girl and the town plaguing her mind.

That’s part of the lore we’re setting up for this new in-game world. There will be a large overarching theme regarding memories, but we’ll have info on that when we’re a bit more certain.

In terms of technical details, Project Dream Farm will be a slower-paced, slice of life, yuri dating sim. You’ll create a small farm and settlement that can be expanded to entice more characters to live there. Once you persuade a new character to join your settlement, you can spend more time with them, get to know them and, ahem.. “get to know them” by doing their special story quests. New characters that join the settlement will bring their own benefits, such as new shops or game mechanics that the player can take advantage of.

When you’re not romancing and befriending the girls, Project Dream Farm will also be a farming simulator and a resource management game. That means that aside from spending time with characters you can expect to farm, fish, mine, and forage, among other things to help expand your settlement.

Before diving any deeper, we want to mention that at this very moment we’re trying to make a game build that’s playable and presentable as quickly as possible so we can keep the Patreon running. Because of that, we’ve made a small list of what will be included in the first build:

1. Overworld, Overworld sprites and Movement for Player and Fox Girl
2. Dialogue with Animated Art for Player and Fox Girl
3. 1 NSFW Scene (Possibly 2 depending on how fast we make progress.)
4. Farming System
5. Menus and some GUI (The sexiest thing on the list)

Anything that’s not listed here will be added in future builds. Now that we’ve got that out of the way, let’s go into some of the details.

The Art

To start, Project Dream Farm will have animated Dialogue Sprites. What kind of animations? We’re aiming for something similar to this or this. We’ve finished the character dialogue art for the first two characters and hope to have an animation to show 

Here’s a peek at the first two characters of the game.

They will both be featured in the first build of Project Dream Farm.

And a WIP of the dialogue sprite animation. Some parts are a bit too over-animated but we're working on it!

Since this game will have movement and an overworld, there will be an overworld Sprite which we are still in the process of designing. 

We’re debating going with hand-drawn frames or using the same bone system from oni to animate them. Each method has its pros and cons, so we’ll need to decide carefully here.

While the hand-drawn frames have their charm, they’re more time consuming and intensive on Doku to make, and even harder to give them any customizability. The bone animated ones, on the other hand, don’t have the same level of charm as the hand-drawn ones, but will be way easier to make new outfits and hair for and will generally be faster and easier to work with.

NSFW Scenes

The NSFW scenes will consist of a stage system that the player can progress through. As a scene progresses, a stamina bar will drain and the player will be able to prevent the drain by clicking on the right parts of a character’s body. If the stamina is kept from hitting 0, the scene will progress to the next stage, where a change of pose or something new happens.

Scene progression will require a bit of knowledge regarding what the scene entails as well as stamina management. If the player spent all day farming and then decided to go try a difficult scene with no stamina, then they’ll likely fail.

We’ll be posting more stages of this scene for patrons since it gets NSFW and we can’t post nudity on public posts. (Please excuse the background from cappuccino as it’s only a placeholder for the time being.)

Scene stages will have types to them that affect how they are played. At the moment, we have four types of stages planned and the first build will feature Clicking Type and Talking Type.

• Clicking Type: Click spots on the scene as they are designated. Example: Touching a character’s body.
• Rhythm Type: Click a specific location to the rhythm of a heartbeat or pulse on screen. Example: Thrusting scenes. (Thrusting out of sync will drain stamina faster.)
• Talking Type: Navigate through dialogue in Visual Novel style. These will be mostly used for world-building or character stories. Example: Learning about a character while bathing with them.
• Mouse Tracking Type: Follow a cursor with your mouse to build up points or a meter. Example: Petting a fox girl’s head from left to right.

We may end up adding more scene types as we go but we’re going to start with just these and get some feedback first.

Lastly, there will be a progression system tied to NSFW scenes in order to reward players for clearing them. Areas of the world will be obscured by mist and can be accessed when the player has accrued enough of a special currency that can only be obtained in these kinds of scenes.

Farming System

As we mentioned above, you’ll be able to farm, fish, forage, mine, and more, but most of those things will be added over time as we see how feasible they are and what the best way of handling them is.

For the first build we’ve been focusing on adding farming and we’ve already got the barebones system ready! 

We’re still making the world terrain and decorations so the grass and soil you’re seeing will be replaced to the final art before we release anything. In the gifs below you can see our test plant’s growth cycle from a seed to a fully grown and harvestable chili plant.

 The player sprite goes around picking up the prototype tools and seeds.

Soil has states and must be tilled before a crop is able to be planted.

Plant growth example. Some plants will die after being harvested, whereas others will give fruit multiple times. Plants can also die if they are not watered enough! 

Menus and GUI

We’ve got a mockup for how we plan for the inventory, stamina bar and dialogue boxes to look. We’re going with a triangular fractal pattern that will glimmer slightly. Again, these are just mockups and so the color and the actual pattern will be different in the final menus. We’ll also adjust them to make sure it’s easy to read over the busy pattern.

For a few of the questions we’re expecting:

Will there be male player characters? Trans characters? Futanari? Non-sentient dicks?

Right now, No. Down the line, We don’t know. We definitely want to give players options, but at this very moment, we’re trying to get a game build that’s playable and presentable ready as quickly as possible so we can keep the Patreon running and keep doing full-time development. Because of that, for now, we’re just going to focus on having a female protagonist and yuri NSFW content.

Once we have the first playable build released and all of the uncertainty and stress simmers down a little, then we’ll revisit character customizability and any deviances from the initial female player character.

Is the game NSFW? How NSFW are we talking?
Yep! That’s one of the ways you get to know the other characters and spend time with them.

Some scenes may be kind of vanilla but we’ll try to push the envelope and add some raunchy stuff if a character’s personality fits it or it’s in high demand.

Will Scenes be Playable with Different Characters?

This will depend on the scene. Some complex scenes will be character-specific. The first one for example has multiple layers of the player’s clothes that won’t work very well if a character isn’t wearing the exact same thing.

Thankfully, we are able to recycle rigs in a much more efficient way now and will make every effort to have as many scenes available to multiple characters.

Will there be Free-Play mode?

Yes! Though not at first. Free Play mode was generally well-liked by players in Project Cappuccino, so we’ll figure out a way of incorporating that here too.

If you have any other questions, definitely drop them in the comments and we’ll be glad to answer!

Let us know what you think!

-Vanis & Doku