The quest for the simple farm life has experienced a boom recently, both in the media and in computer games (e.g., Farmville), which allow those of us who haven't moved to farms to still grow lettuce in the city, keep bees, or at least care for virtual sheep, pigs, and wheat fields.

The Czech game developer Hammerware produced a 3-D real-time strategy game called Family Farm back in 2011 and won a national award for it. Now the game's successor, Goodfolks, has hit the market. The new game is different in many ways, but it still runs natively on Linux thanks to the open source engine Ogre3d (see the "Installation" box).

Intel users, however, are out of luck because Goodfolks, like its predecessor, runs only on AMD/ATI and NVidia graphics cards with their proprietary drivers. The "Family Farm vs. Goodfolks" box describes the main differences between the two games.

Goodfolks differs from its predecessor in that the game is now open ended. According to Hammerware spokesman Martin Prochazka, the open-endedness was a request from fans; however, players can discover or unlock new things at each level. Once you've achieved a level, there's an end sequence, but you can always continue playing. If you want to start again, you can simply choose another character (Figure 1), which puts you at level one again.

Figure 1: After a game ends, you wind up at the main menu, where Goodfolks stores your previous progress. The main menu also provides certain technical options, such as full-screen mode.

So, who are these good folks? Play starts with a farmer and his wife with fields in front of their home, cultivating vegetables and wheat, raising animals, eating, sleeping, and working some more. With the money they earn, they buy new houses, clear the woods of trees, and expand their property. Each new home has a new owner, and the village eventually becomes populated. Once you achieve all the tasks, you'll reach the Goodfolks end sequence.

The challenge for players is to build up the food chain and keep things in balance. You need to grow vegetables and wheat, produce food from them, and increase the yield to include the animals (Figure 2).

Figure 2: Cows produce milk and valuable manure, but they need to be fed.

For example, cows need vegetables regularly, and sometimes herbs if they get sick. Consequently, they produce milk and quite a lot of manure. The manure in turn serves to increase vegetable yield. Six units of vegetables and two units of manure help to produce a field producing 22 units of vegetables, enough to feed all the animals and prepare meals for the farm families. If you don't feed the animals after a few rounds, they'll die. If you breed sheep, you can harvest wool, which is a valuable commodity. The general goal is to strike a balance between cultivating raw material and producing things to sell.

Getting Started

You'll notice the main Goodfolks task controls in Figure 2. At the bottom right is the field planner where you can drag and drop what you want to plant in a field. Depending on the level achieved, different options are available. Apart from the kind of field to cultivate (wheat, vegetables, sheep, etc.), you also see how many tiles it needs. A horse corral, for example, requires four tiles (Figure 3).

Figure 3: More opportunities for applying tiles occur during the course of the game. A field is for grazing animals or growing wheat or vegetables.

In the left bottom corner of Figure 2, you'll notice four control icons. Idle ones shows the currently inactive farmers, Tasks shows the number of incomplete tasks, Hungry ones shows the number of workers with empty stomachs, and Hungry animals shows the animals who need to be fed. If you click Tasks , a characteristic gray arrow appears that, for example, points to an empty field. Clicking the arrow causes the next free worker to run in and plow or harvest the field. If the number of tasks exceeds the number of idle workers, the game deactivates the gray arrows until a willing worker becomes available.

If farmers have hungry animals, numbers appear in the corresponding fields. This warns farmers to feed them with vegetables or other foodstuffs – provided they're available – and with herbs if they get sick (see the "Herbal Remedies" box).

Herbal Remedies

If farm animals get sick, they need to be fed with a unit of herbs or they'll die within a few game rounds. Unfortunately, you can't plant herbs as you would wheat, but they grow as byproducts in fields. Among new vegetable or wheat plantings, you'll also see a blue herb (Figure 4) with a percentage figure. This figure indicates the likelihood that the given field will yield an herb byproduct. Watch out for the herb cultivation and best avoid cooking with foods requiring a lot of valuable herbs.

Figure 4: The percentage figures at the bottom indicate the likelihood that the officially cultivated field product will yield herbs.

Food Gathering

To prepare food for the hungry farmers, click the plate icon at the top of the screen (Figure 2); the game pauses a while at this point. You can choose from a number of different foods, depending on the given raw material (Figure 5). For example, to make a pumpkin pie, you need 8 units of wheat, 4 eggs, 16 units of vegetables, and 4 units of milk. Foods that have more nutritional value can satisfy more people; a pumpkin pie can serve four persons (and provide four satisfaction points), while roast meat can only serve two persons (and provide six satisfaction points). Many potential meals become unavailable when the raw materials for them, such as vegetables and wheat, are unavailable also.

Figure 5: A pie can satisfy four workers but requires more raw materials.

Preparing food takes varying time, although the process is much faster than in Family Farm. When you click the plate icon over the button for a hungry person, they begin to eat and can immediately begin work again. You can also prepare a meal in advance so that something in the kitchen can await a hardworking laborer. Be careful, though, not to use any scarce raw materials for meals.

Becoming Liquid

During the game, click on the plate icons to see how many raw materials you have (vegetables, manure, or herbs) (Figure 2). This shows you whether you're hitting a bottleneck.

You can also sell the produce you've been toiling over. It's particularly worthwhile to sell wool (for which the game apparently has no real purpose) or meat or fish, which you can use for limited meals. These raw materials also provide you with some money. Selling vegetables and fruit, however, isn't worth the trouble; you'll need them to feed your animals and cultivate your fields, etc.

Jobs

That still leaves the tasks. If you want to maintain the basic food supplies for your workers, they'll have many tasks to perform, as detailed by the TO DO icon. With each new level that your chosen character reaches, the game provides new tasks and the character has new opportunities, such as breeding horses. You can also repair structures or erect monuments in the countryside, for which you'll get extra bonus points.

Conclusion

Goodfolks differs from, but is a worthy successor to, Family Farm. It simplifies some rather complicated procedures, although perhaps sometimes excessively. Fans requested an open game, but I missed the additional scenarios that of Family Farm provided. Goodfolks has a world that doesn't change once completed. Family Farm had several missions with differently configured farms, so the fun lasted longer.

The missing scenarios are my main criticism of the game, apart from some sloppy translation. Other things took a turn for the better in the new version. The seasons in Family Farm made little sense and were dropped, as were the annoying lunch rituals. And, because characters in Goodfolks don't have individualized skills, they don't need to be controlled individually, so the next available person is simply called in to complete a task.

When you think of "real-time" gaming, you might think of labored clickfests. But, Goodfolks proceeds more gradually. Only toward the end of the game, when fields, animals, and farmers all reach their maximum, do things start getting hectic. But, after all, that's the fun of the game.