After the release of Version 0.5.1 on March 31 this year, the Early Access (EA) phase of Herbals Tycoon has come to a temporary close. We are now hard at work developing the full release version. During this process, we will dedicate ourselves to learning Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) knowledge, which will serve as the core gameplay pillar—rebuilding the original superficial, weak progression-focused gameplay of a pure TCM clinic management sim.
This project has had a rocky journey to its current state, undergoing three major overhauls. When I joined the team in 2024, I noticed flaws in the previous development workflow: the gameplay loop had not been finalized, yet most of the assets were already complete. This included character sprites, clinic departments, three growth stages for herbs in the medicine garden, tools for slicing and processing herbs, and even the opening cutscene (a paper-cut animation). However, the script was written in the style of an AVG (Adventure Visual Novel), with excessive scenes, actions, and long, rigid dialogue. Instead of a TCM story, it read more like a wuxia (martial arts) tale—(we may share excerpts from this earlier script someday). At the time, the project’s founder (now my co-founder) had only one year of funding left, so there was extreme urgency to launch.
As a result, my entire 2024 was spent on one task: using the assets left by the previous producer to build a playable game framework from scratch. I repurposed pre-existing characters, herbs, and management assets to create a functional prototype. Our team members are lifelong fans of simulation games—growing up, we loved titles like Theme Hospital, Paladin’s Inn, Chinese Inn, Stardom, Convenience Store, and Uncharted Waters. You’ll notice Herbals Tycoon weaves in mechanics from many of these:
Separating diagnosis and treatment rooms (inspired by Theme Hospital),
Special visitor events during management (from Chinese Inn),
Random resource generation during exploration (from Paladin’s Inn),
Dispatchable tasks (from Stardom),
Business planning systems (from Convenience Store),
and more.
Yet after completing the EA version, we realized a critical flaw: simply “stitching” mechanics together wasn’t fun. Merging systems we loved as kids made the game overly complex and unfocused. Fortunately, we secured seed funding this year. After carefully listening to feedback from EA players, we made a painful but necessary decision: to rebuild the project from the ground up. We concluded that patching the EA framework would never fully improve the game’s educational value or fun factor.
I previously worked in game development at a major studio, but I only started learning game design when I took over this project—and quickly realized it’s a far deeper discipline than I imagined. In my view, the EA version of Herbals Tycoon had two key issues:
Lack of conceptual integrity: The design idea was disjointed. While clinic management was meant to be the core, all playable components felt isolated—they failed to integrate with the game’s fundamental concepts or serve the core loop effectively.
Insufficient TCM educational value: Initially, we worried that incorporating in-depth TCM knowledge would raise the barrier to entry, overwhelming players unfamiliar with the subject. So we created a more superficial clinic management experience. However, after launch, we discovered most players bought the game because they were interested in TCM education. This motivated our team to dive deeper into TCM studies.
Through this learning, we realized TCM’s core lies in meridians (energy channels). Even herbs work by targeting specific meridians (a concept called guijing, or “meridian tropism”). In the EA version, meridians were reduced to a trivial mini-game for memorizing head and hand acupoints—with almost no connection to TCM’s actual mechanisms. After much deliberation, we decided to refocus the game:
Core gameplay: Meridians, and how herbs (via guijing), massage, and acupuncture influence them.
Secondary gameplay: Clinic management and exploration.
This means a complete overhaul of the Herbals Tycoon project. For now, no further updates will be made to the EA version. However, once the rebuilt version is ready for playtesting, we will move the current EA build to a separate Steam branch (so players can still access the old version) and release the new rebuilt version.
I aim to release a demo of the rebuilt version before the Lunar New Year. It will be available for free on the Herbals Tycoon Demo page on Steam.
Thank you all for your support of the Herbals Tycoon project and our team!
By Huang Gaole, Producer