Ok, below are my snazzy hand drawn designs for the game: SpaceOreMiner. Nice and simple. Its based on a game I used to play on my old 486 dx2 ( yay! Math co-proccesor! Heh ), called Miner VGA. The game was simple, but strangely addictive. You play a miner in the old west, and mine under a town trying to win the respect of, errm, ladies of dubious virtue.
In my version, it will be set in the future, and you will be mining under the surface of an asteroid, and you will be trying to win the respect of megacorps 🙂
So, here are the hand drawn designs. Whenever planning something I like to scribble/doodle on a bit of paper first, it helps the entire experience be more tactile.
Funky Hand-drawn Image of SpaceOreMiner
It will be a simple side on view, the interactive player taking the form of a small ship ( or Mole ) which is released from a freaking huge portable mining rig ( the Limar ). The Limar for now will just be a static background ship. Once the Mole is full of tasty minerals, it will return to the Limar to transfer its cargo, which in return is turned into some form of monetary unit. Rather than a traditional mining gear ( i.e. Axe or epic drill/screw like thing ) the Mole will be equipped with a Mining laser, this will blast away at the base material of the asteroid, leaving only the harder and denser ( and therefore more valuable ) ore. To reach the Limar from the tunnels you will have created you will have a resource : fuel. The fuel provides power to jump up tunnels, and also to go vertically up shafts. This enables the core game play to be about intelligently designing tunnels – as the tunnels are destroy once, recreate on game over, the play will have to intelligently pick easy tunnels to ascend ( with small steps ) vs wide open spaces which will have the highest ore return. If you run out of fuel, your Mole is useless and falls to wherever it lays, triggering game over.
I’ve chosen this game for several different reasons :
1. I love the idea of being a space miner, I spent many hours in EVE with a mining laser stuck to whatever I ship I could get my hands on, getting the bigger and bigger ships, constantly annoyed that the PVP aspect hinders my space mining fetish. If only I had been born in another 300 years time, when I could be a real space miner 🙂
2. Conceptually easy. It is a pretty simple game to write. There are no difficult game play aspects I can’t think around. Its simple and to the point.
3. It’s a game I actually want to play 🙂
4. Expandable. Once the original game prototype is up, there is a LOT I can do with it. Different ores, different asteroids, many different bonuses, Limar upgrades and interactions.
5. The game as is has no lore. It screeeeeeams for some form of lore ( or background story, whatever you want to call it ). No time will need to be spent explaining why you are on some asteroid mining stuff.
6. Appeals to my collector-instinct. I love collecting stuff, collecting different space ores sound pretty damn cool to me.
7. Its realistic. It is a simple game concept, and simple game play. Ease of return vs Ore yield is pretty much the central game concept. It’s not really twitch based, and there are no other real complexities to it. Just get the ore, and return. Repeat.
8. Re-playability. Ore locations will be randomised, as such every game potentially yields different results. The key to finding the best combination of simple tunnels to tasty ore will be very different on each game. Perhaps you dug straight down, and hit loads of ore the first game. Second game you try the same thing and don’t achieve it, so you branch at the bottom. This yields nothing either. So you start again and start to mine sideways, hitting ore straight away. Do you abandon your dig straight down choice, or continue to dig sideways?
tl;dr : I is gonna make a space mining game.
lamentconfig