I am taking a leaf from games such as RuneScape's book, and making a lot of the scenery in my game interactive. Trees, plants, rocks...

I'm doing this in the form of axes, spades, and other various tools; fishing rods etc etc.

For those who haven't played it, my game is made in PHP, HTML and Javascript (jQuery).

I don't know how to make this all interesting

I could just have click x get y, but that would get boring fast. I am using game variables and switches to store the state of each object in each map, so it's all dynamic and looks nice, but I'm not sure what to do about playability, keeping it interesting and not just click spam grinding.

Any ideas?

I thought about trying to construct some sort of minigame in javascript, but I'm not sure how that would play out, since anything like that can be hacked by just editing the code in Firefox.

Why not just have things like plants drop a small bit of health. It's cute and interactive, but not much reason to even bother with it (Unless you're like level 1). Maybe trees can drop sticks and acorns, whatever those do in your game I'm not sure. Rocks could drop some sort of crystal or deposit, or even a small amount of money. You know, just drop small worthless stuff, if you feel they have to do anything. Also maybe make them do a cute sound effect like when you squirt the Sunflowers in Super Mario Sunshine.

Biggest problem with forming a response to your question is we don't really know the systems you're working with. Thus how can we come up with an interesting system for you?

How about making certain spots only interactive during certain times of the day? Seems simple enough. Minigames would get repetitive anyways, just as repetitive as a normal system. The difference is you'd have wasted more time for something that would quickly become an inconvenience for players. You might get lucky if you make the item received based on your dexterity. There's a number of ways to do this. But if they're easily manipulated in your web browser whats the point? Then again, why not do a flashed based minigame instead of Java? Something as simple as click the moving dot or hit the right key on time may be good. You could also enable a setting that skips the minigame and just gives you a random item.

Yeah sorry I was trying to be uh... more generic so others could gain from the thread I guess.

In short, my game revolves around battles, and moving around maps using four arrow buttons. On each map is some scenery, which might include trees, done with just an image like this:



My idea was to make part of these images clickable, only I'm not sure what to do once they're clicked. Add an item with a respawn timer? Play a minigame? Something more involving?

Those two listed sound good enough for a simple game. Taking it farther is up to you. As a developer it's your call to decide what system you're gonna use :3 I think my previously mentioned statements are as good as I can get without just tossing out tons of hit or miss ideas.