Someone commented yesterday that they want me to be more focused on game play than pretty graphics. So I thought I would take a few to explain whats happening with the next version of SpaceOreMiner ( tentatively labelled version 2.0 ).
Obvously, there is quite a large graphical overhaul going on. Current build weighs in at about 15 meg, which personally I find a bit too large for a webplayer, so it is a case of tweaking texture sizes and model settings in order to get a smaller webplayer – I don’t want people closing the game because it takes to long to load 🙂
On top of the overhaul, there quite a few gameplay changes coming. The first on is that asteroid positioning system is now a buyable from the shop, rather than just an instant helper item. Don’t worry – it is nice and cheap 🙂
Another minor change is that when the ores are spawned, their rotation is randomised, though this is just a very small change, it makes the game look much more realistic – no sea of Lavarite pointing all in the same direction.
Also debating combing ore drop off and the shop into one point. You land on the Limar, sell everything and the shop screen comes up. The two different locations seem to be confusing some people alas. I’ll change it and have a play and see how it feels.
A big gameplay change which I’m just finishing at the moment is implementing focus crystals. These are used by your mining lasers. So what do they do? well, they make the mining laser more powerful. There are now four stratas of rock on the roid, and in order to mine through these different stratas you will need to purchase increasingly powerful focus crystals. Adds a new level of thought to the game, do you just buy capacitor upgrades so you can mine for longer, or do you buy a focus crystal to get further down, and hence mine more profitable crystals. Will be interesting to see how that pans out 🙂
I’ve got a few more gameplay tweaks that I have in mind before I do a big version 2.0 release. Also the back story itself is slowly appearing in a secret wiki 🙂
Once again, feel free to comment/feedback.
Oh and it looks like the the scanilty clad babes of twitter spam like the new updates to the graphics of SpaceOreMiner :
Honestly, I am sure these are real women ...
Crazy, crazy spam. Oh well, atleast the keywords are getting out there, even if the links arn’t 🙂
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Brilliant! Looking forward to the new updates! As a guideline I believe sites like addicting games and miniclip require their games to be no more than around 5MB to 10MB. I realize there is quite a lot of overhead incurred with the unity player but keep the texture sizes down and the poly count low and it’s very achievable.
Always good to know you have fans… even if they’re only cooling the bots that spam your twitter account! XD
And I’m looking forward to getting them out there 🙂 Feels strange not to have released anything in so long, heh. There is a fairly huge change I want to make to the game, but looking at my own documents, they are going to be atleast 1-2 weeks to get done, so going to add these current features, get the graphics all pretty and release version 2. One of the major things that I’ll request of people once version 2 is out, is help with balancing, I’ll do a blog post about it once it is out – I’ve introduced a lot of new things so the balancing is defo going to be a very intresting exercise 🙂
I can’t see this heading to addicting games and miniclip, esp not with the direction it is heading with currently, its gonna get pretty niche and tied into my own servers – unsure what the policies are on these sites about that kinda thing. Would be nice to get that much exposure – hmmm, maybe I will have a ponder 🙂 Far from worried about advertising at this stage 🙂 Still very much alpha, hehe.
And yes, I do have fans, and judging by their twitter avatars, they are an amazing bunch of random women who really seem to dig indie gaming – is there any better sort of fan? 😉