The harvest mechanic is a very straight forward game mechanic used in a lot of games. When it comes to online social games, no game is more famous for this game mechanic than that of FarmVille. Don’t be fooled though, the mechanic itself is not directly related to farming. Rather the basic premise of the mechanic is that you setup an object (plant a seed) and then after period of time (growing period) you can reap the benefits of a mature object (final plant to harvest).
The easiest example to use to visualize the harvest mechanic is from farming. After plantings, watering and tending to your crop, you are able to harvest the food that grows from it.
There is really no right or wrong way to implement this mechanic. In fact, there are a lot of different variation of this mechanic depending on what your game is actually trying to achieve. Let’s spend a few minutes looking at ways that game designers take to make the most out of the harvest mechanic.
Expiration period to end the Harvest Mechanic
One of the most common ways that game designers expand the harvest mechanic is by introducing some sort of expiration period. Meaning, if you do not collect your matured item within a set amount of time, the matured object expires. In the game FarmVille, if you have ever arrived back to your farm to see your crops withered, then this is what just happened.
If you plan on adding an expiration period to your games objects, be cautious about the impact this will have on your users. Imagine a particular user who works hard in your game and spends a lot of in game currency to setup several objects. These objects take 24 hours to mature and will expire 48 hours after maturing. If the user happens to get sick and misses the collection period, that user will be really disheartened with your game when they come back to find all of their hard earned objects expired.
Add a way for users to recover expired objects within your game. Don’t make it free otherwise the value of the expiration timeframe will be invalidated. Rather make the pain process of recovering expired items a little less painful. You may find that this addition will help retain users even after they lose their objects.
Staged growth periods to expand the Harvest Mechanic
Another route to expand the harvest mechanic is to add a staged growth period. This means that in order for an object to mature into a finished one, the user has to interact with it during the “growing” process. Imagine you have a game similar to FarmVille and your user wants to plant tomatoes that will take 24 hours to mature. You can add some variety to the game play by breaking this 24 growth period into two different 12 hour segments. After the first 12 hour segment has elapsed, the user must interact with the plant, such as by watering it, in order for it to go into the second growth period.
This add on mechanic helps expand the game in many aspects. First is that is now takes longer for the user to finish their particular routine. Pay close attention to statistics on this addition to make sure that you are not making the growth period too low, causing user frustration, fatigue and ultimately departure. Secondly is that you have an opportunity to introduce an economic element into the growth period. Maybe during this growth period you need to spend another consumable such as water or plant food to make your objects get into the next phase.
Pay to collect at the end of the Harvest Mechanic
A pay to collect routine at the end of the harvest mechanic can add a lucrative avenue for your in game economy. That is, if the add on mechanic is done properly. As a basic explanation this add on mechanic means that once the growth period has elapsed and the user is ready to collect their object, they must pay an additional game element in order to collect the matured object.
At first this might seem just like a gauging technique. Well - it can be implemented that way but it will most likely not have much success. For example, if you force your users to pay a simple in game coin fee to collect their objects, your users will most likely be frustrated. However, there are other ways to charge users without using coins or making them feel penny pinched.
An example of doing this properly could be by limiting the number of completed objects that a single user can have in play at any one time. If the user wants to have more, they have to build a storage unit or pay some sort of storage fee. Alternatively, if your game employs an energy or similar consumable within the game, you could make the collection process require a unit of this in game currency as an action. If you take this route, make sure to tie in a reward for expending the energy, such as a XP point or something similar.
