A possibly dynastic view of the game

The goal of the game, as I see it, is to allow for the user to experience being a boke breeder. One of the concepts that I have stuck to the most over the past five years is the concept of developing a breed of bokes that can do specific tasks, similarly to how humans have domesticated dogs over time. I still want to stick to this core experience. I think that overall, starting from a "wild" population, it might take 10-20 generations before some core behaviors can be established (for example, that your breed is particularly good at hunting, or accomplished at retrieving items from trees and thus allows you to gather many fruit), and perhaps 25-40 before a breed is "perfected," whatever that means (to some degree this would be up to the player, though NPCs can offer hints as to when you are "successful" in an as yet undetermined manner).

The current structure of the game, as it stands, is that you are an owner of bokes. Each turn represents a "day," during which you care for your bokes by feeding, grooming, training them, and having adventures with them. As the game expands (in coding), this would also allow other daily activities (or daily-ish activities) which include gardening, meeting NPCs, etc. The gameplay loop is essentially a "day-in-the-life," with certain days being more momentous than others (for instance, a day when you decide which bokes to pair).  The game is primarily text and menu-based.

The difficulty with this structure is that of course, playing a lifespan of a boke can take many, many turns. In its current format, a boke might live for 90 turns, but may be bred at 45 turns, which means that the goal of 10 generations takes ~450 turns, and assuming a turn takes 10 minutes, that is 75 hours, which is a bit too long for the absolute basics. I want people to find this enjoyable, and not a slog. For comparison, Stardew Valley takes about 50 hours to complete if you're not going for all the extras. Of course a user can actually breed a boke at 20 days of age and "speedrun," but these bokes would not be very trained nor would they have a high bond. I'm assuming players will want to actually interact with their bokes before breeding them to get to know them better.)

Then shortening the game so that one can perfect a breed in say, 30 hours (assume 30 generations), means one of two things:

Option 1. The number of turns should be reduced, but stay "day-in-the-life" style. With the goal of having say one generation every hour, this might mean that there are only 6 turns before a boke can be bred (this would be equivalent to the old 45 turns), so that a boke's lifetime only lasts 12 turns.

Option 2. The turns change in scope so that a turn now encompasses decisions you are making about your bokes over the course of a season. Each season, you must manage your labor and resources so that you can set aside food for the bokes, gather resources, and prepare for the next season. Instead of day-in-the-life care that may require a lot of pointing and clicking, you make sure you have the resources required to care for bokes, and take actions during the turn that will impact next season. (I will have an example on this in a moment.) This means that a boke still may only have 12 turns of a lifetime, but now each turn is treated as a season and your decisions are made at the scope of a season, not a day that is kind of a season.

The trouble I can see with Option 1, reducing the number of turns, is that the timescale is very strange. You are making daily decisions, but a boke only lives twelve days. With Option 2, you are making seasonal decisions, so that a boke lives twelve seasons (in actual fact a boke lives about 7.5 years, and seasons will be adjusted to match that). Let's examine this seasonal turn with my best guesstimate of current weather patterns in-game:

It is the wet, hot season, which lasts about a third of the year. You have labor hours which can be put toward caring for your bokes, one big project, one small project, and maintenance tasks. The labor hours you actually get to control are those not required for boke care. You also have resources, such as meat, vegetables, fruit, trinkets, building supplies, enrichment items, etc. For the next turn, you know you need say 100 pieces of meat and 50 pieces of fruit for the food you make for your bokes. You are missing some of that meat, so one of your maintenance tasks may be going out hunting (and you can assign bokes to that job, especially the ones that are good at it; this will allow bokes to grow their skills in that job). You may also assign some labor hours to training younger bokes, because your best hunter is getting older. For a big project, you might choose to spend time gathering the resources to build a new enclosure, which takes a lot of labor hours and some labor power from your bokes to drag items (though they're not very good at it because you decided to specialize in hunters). This is because the wet season encourages a profusion of growth. You may also choose which bokes you wish to breed, and those bokes will have reduced labor power during the season because they are raising bokelets.

The next season is the dry cold season, which also lasts about a third of the year. Your non-boke care labor hours are reduced because you have a lot more bokes now, so you might choose to hire some employees, who will need to be appeased with resources such as food and trinkets. However, they allow you to take on larger projects, such as actually building the enclosure. In this season, fruit and vegetables do not grow, so the bokes that were working on these gathering jobs in the wet season may instead now be tasked with helping build the enclosure, or simply resting, since the last season, the temperate season, is the easiest to get a lot of tasks done in, and bokes who are well-rested going into a season can perform better. 

While a turn may take a fraction of a season, the tone of the game is now more of a "worker-placement" game, in between your breeding decisions, and less of a game about actively caring for the bokes. Essentially, a kind of contrast between Stardew Valley (active care) versus Civilization (seasonal, large turns with worker-placement). 

That said: labor hours must be spent, but there are some "free" actions which I have been considering in both Option 1 and Option 2, that of observing your bokes. This is a quasi-narration of your bokes' personalities, reactions to various stimuli, and health, which will allow you to make decisions about which bokes to place in which jobs.

I'm eager to hear thoughts and commentary on this potentially new way of thinking about the game. I think it solves a lot of present issues of scope creep—by necessity when creating a working breed of animal, you need to create a breed to do something, and that something should be a part of the game, or you just have cosmetic changes.