I've been working out how to make a minimal active farming component for my game and I've got an idea on how to do it.
The basic gameplay is inspired from playing the fishing game on onio.club and Stardew Valley fishing. You press a button to start doing a given resource farming action (mining, fishing, etc). Then you have to wait to align a randomly moving point/bar with some kind of zone. When you click the button again, it'll see where the moving point/bar was at. If it's in the green zone, you trigger a collection event (i.e. you get a fish, maybe something extra randomly). Regardless, you'll stop doing the given resource farming action.
This should work with server verification because the outcome can be simulated server-side using a random seed. When the player presses to start, the server verifies that the user is good to start doing the active farming action, and it sends the seed. The client use that seed to visually simulate all of the zones and moving point/bar stuff, and to take in inputs. The client can send back the time of the second button press, and the server also registers when it got the response. The server can compute the actual outcome, verify it, and disburse the rewards.
I'm implementing and testing this. But I like the idea because this setup could implement a number of different kinds of skills. Even just things as similar as a 1d horizontal bar (like onio.club), a 1d vertical bar (more like Stardew Valley but if fishing took one click), or a 2d space (imagine a pickaxe point moving around and aligning towards a green area on a heatmap).
I don't KNOW if an active component is necessary, but I'm just intrigued by the possibility that it could work at all. And I think it has a purpose cuz it helps to make the game more of a world and less of a UI. I've been thinking about how different early-game Runescape vs Melvor Idle feel. Melvor Idle is obviously extremely similar to Runescape in terms of its progression system, but when all the walking and exploring and poking around the world is compressed into pure UI menuing, it just...doesn't do it for me. I've been enjoying making a map in part because it makes an idle game way more interactive. If this active gameplay setup works, then it would be nice to have it included as a farming option.
My thought is that once I get a "vertical slice" for this going, I can figure out how to post it online, but I'll have to host it off neocities. I've been trying to learn about how to get this set up somewhere, and I'm glad that supabase exists so I don't have to handle auth or server backups manually. If not for that, I probably would have just...stopped dreaming and given up earlier lol.
I worked a really scuffed research job in the past, and I was the one who had to literally create and manage the whole company's data that was very securely saved using the time-honored tradition of copy-pasting stuff in file managers across multiple 4tb drives. It was an absolute nightmare, and I knew it was, but I didn't have the relevant computer science background, and there wasn't any time for me to magically teach myself how to do all that. And I was paid too little as it was.