I have a question about doing the run. There are two ways to marry someone in Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life. One way is to get the girl to like you, and to wait until the end of the year to give the blue feather to her. This is probably the way that the rules intended. The other way is much faster, by getting the girl to four red hearts, you can give her the blue feather then, and then you will propose that way. Which way counts as a run?

Hey guys, I've been working on routing this game for a while so I have some ideas about how we could classify the runs.

The current records end when Celia accepts the proposal after sleeping for the whole year. This is probably faster than getting the four hearts and proposing, but is kinda boring to watch and run, as there is not any optimisation work that would make it interesting. I suggest that we give this a separate category (maybe called sleep%), to say we have 'won' by getting the proposal from the end-of-year cutscene.

I think that for girl%s, we should end the timer at when the girl accepts the proposal, as that is when the interesting part of the run ends and saves lots of sleep mashing.

This way, we have a separate category for the faster Celia proposal through sleep mashing (sleep%), while still having clear categories for being active with the proposal to all of the girls (Celia%, Muffy%, Nami%). This is similar to how some other games keep the out-of-bounds categories separate, because although they are faster, they follow different routes because of the rules that are decided upon.

hype to see people legitimately interested in speedrunning HM.

was wondering what you guys thought about other categories for AWL? i haven't played the game casually for many years but iirc there are a variety of possible "career" outcomes for your son in the game. perhaps an even more interesting run of the game would involve full completion targeting some of those possible careers? that is, make a category for each one. of course, this could either be more interesting or more boring, as there is probably some default career that you get by marrying a certain girl + sleeping for the rest of the game, but it's just a thought for something that might make for an interesting full-game category.

I think runs that involve going into the later game would be really interesting. Not sure how long a full game run would take, but it would probably be really long

In terms of deciding your child's career, I know that the different child of each girl will slightly sway for one career more, but I don't know how much. Celia's son is more interested in farming, Muffy's son is more interested in being an athlete, and Nami's son doesn't really care, as long as he's not an athlete. From what I've read on HM wikis and sites, your child's career is mostly influenced by making certain friends and buying your child certain toys.

I think as a possible full game run, aside from the child's career, would be a run in which the player has to reach the end of the game but also has to meet certain objectives, maybe something like having a certain amount of profit made, either by the end of the game or each year, by fully expanding the farm or something along the lines of that, just so the player actually has something to work for.

A slightly longer run for the game which I've been working on for awhile now, is an All Animals run, which runs into the second chapter of the game and involves doing things other than sleeping.

The only other possible categories are things like getting all the tools, or befriending all of the villagers, maybe even something a bit more silly like all fishes, crops or recipes.