Indie Developer seeks world domination
After seeing a lot more people getting a score in the game, thanks to the giant floating labels of knowledge, I thought just before I started rl work, that I would make a quick youtube video explaining how to play. Just to remove all risk of people getting confused by the gameplay aspects 🙂
Watch the video, then play the game here :
http://www.greenslimegames.com/games/spaceoreminer/
lamentconfig
I mentioned in my first post my shunning of social networks. Let me explain further. Personally, I have avoided social networks, the exceptions being reddit and lurking on slashdot. Other than that, posting my mundane experiences to people I barely know, in some form of voyeuristic boasting has held no appeal. [Ironically I became addicted to twitter shortly after this. ED]
I recently joined facebook, under an alias, to look at the games that I had heard so much about. I shall not mention any names or specifics at this point, but the entire concept of them being ‘games’ offended me. Maybe I should get out more 🙂
1. Viral as necessary mechanic. This annoyed me the most. The spam on my wall, the pointless invite others to progress, spam your friends to show you are better, etc; etc;
2. Viral as a need to progress. Hitting walls because I wouldn’t invite my friends, being negatively effected because I refuse to post about some random game event.
3. Click. I realise that clicking is a required operation. It’s quite essential for most computer interactions. However, having to perform mindless repetitive clicks over and over again seemed at best stupid, at worse a soul destroying activity which brought me closer to the brainwashed masses.
4. YAY! BRIGHT COLOURS! I’M A CARTOON. Alas, if only this was confined to just browser based games, it might be tolerable. But, it has crept into every facet of gaming. Now, art style is a very unique factor, what someone might like, someone else will hate. I’m not trying to force my views on anyone, but, imho toon style sucks.
5. Click ( again ) and wait. When an entire game hinges on watching a percentage meter going up, or a timer going down I am very much reminded of the excellent work of Progress Quest. Other than that awesome code based comment on modern gaming, it really grinds my gears.
6. Buy our fake money and get better at the game! I may regret saying this in future, as micro payment systems do seem to be one of the best ways of making a living from a game ( which I would LOVE to do ), however, using real life money to increase my abilities during a game just strikes me as a pointless waste. Now, don’t get me wrong – I like shaking my epeen as much as the rest of the net, cosmetic enhancements, I have no issues with. Look at my new shiny thing! Bet you wish you had enough money to waste on such a fruitless sprite. A better player being proportional to a player who spends a lot of money is not a good game mechanic, no matter how rich it makes you.
7. You can’t loose! I know, I tried. On several games, I set out to loose, making bad choices, letting my timers expire ( oh noes! ). And found it impossible. At no point did I see a game over, or a ‘you smegged up big time, reset time?’. This largely removed any sort of emotional risk I would have with playing a game. To quote the tagline of my favourite indie game, Dwarf Fortress, Losing is Fun!
8. Install our spyware/game enhancement! My god, I honestly didn’t believe people would fall for this. The information gatherable by any software installation ( esp into your browser ) is astounding. Agreeing to use a toolbar, no matter how innocent looking it is makes you wide open to all sorts of info gathering. You might not think your browsing habits are interesting. But I can promise you the market research company paying for your info thinks very differently.
9. Bloody Viral. Sorry, but this REALLY is a major urk for me. I get viral. If its done well, its an amazing traffic driver ( and some may even call it beautiful in its implementation). There are some awesome viral campaigns out there. You won’t find any awesome viral on facebook games. Spammy as hell. Repetitive annoyance isn’t good viral.
10. Lowest common denominator. Yes, I appreciate a large percentage of the facebook population are not gamers. This is fine. But when your facebook advert appears with text indicating that this is a game, that I, a gamer, will want to play, and it ends up being the most pointless click and wait fest ever, I’m gonna be annoyed.
11. Compare to your friends! Who cares how you are compared to everyone else? I want a challenge. Don’t get me wrong, I like seeing how my scores compare to my friends, bragging rights are always awesome. But what I really want to see is how good I am compared to EVERYONE who plays the game. I wanna be the very best! Like no one ever was! ( hmmm, maybe that reference goes against 4, but those games ARE classics! 🙂 ).
Oh my, that was a more angsty rant than I thought it would be 🙂 Please, if anyone who has read this has an actual facebook game which is cool, feel free to comment. I am very happy to be proved wrong with this 🙂
tl:dr; facebook games suck.
lamentconfigI found a really awesome post on the unity forums : http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/63282-Bump-maps-for-built-in-terrain which links to this awesome bit of code : http://sixtimesnothing.wordpress.com/2010/10/10/bump-mapping-for-built-in-unity-terrain/. I’ve played around a bit with it, to see if it will fit SpaceOreMiner, and you can see the results below :
Without :
Without mapping
With :
With Mapping
Still playing around with it, hence no updated web player – very interested to see what else I can use this for 🙂
lamentconfigHmmm, might have found the source of the random game drop. Sometimes the unity player complains about ‘rejected – no crossdomain.xml policy file was found’. After a bit of googling ( and only just noticing this myself, no idea whats triggered it, it was fine during my testing ) I found the following :
http://unity3d.com/support/documentation/Manual/Security%20Sandbox.html
Basically, in order to get things working nicely, you need to have a file called crossdomain.xml in the root directory of your server.
This file needs to contain the following :
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<cross-domain-policy>
<allow-access-from domain="*"/>
</cross-domain-policy>
Hopefully this will help someone out there 🙂
Well, not really, but if anything will grab traffic, its a unity project mentioning MMORPG. Hehe.
After my joy of getting my project back from the unity peeps yesterday, I’ve been hard at work adding things to SpaceOreMiner. The youtube video that I’m about to upload showcases them all, however, lets type what I have now 🙂
After listening to feedback, I’ve stopped the mining laser from hitting the ore, the mining laser now zooms straight through them, which makes the overall mining effect much cooler. I’ve also added a self destruct button, which ends your game, meaning I get to log your stats if you get bored of playing 🙂
Another major change to the game play itself is the addition of a shop. If you land on the pad on the Limar, you can now spend your hard earned cash on upgrading the mole. Which is pretty dang sweet. The prices and actual changes to your stats I’ve just made up for now – I have a feeling the level 1 upgrade to your engines is totally overpowered, and will prolly get nerfed 🙂 I’d love to hear feedback if anyone has any idea on prices they feel would be better, or values that would be better.
Where to sell ore and where to buy upgrades
The single ( most uber ) change is now you can log into the game 🙂 I’m not collecting emails or anything, so don’t expect to be able to reset your password yet. It’s pretty un-user friendly at the moment, but I wanted to add it to show where I was going with the game. You can even create an account within the game itself! enjoy people! I know I am 🙂 Once you have logged in, you will stay logged in as long as the webplayer stays open. If you want to see your updated stats, just log in again and they will display them – Once I get some players in there, then I will produce a web frontend, maybe with some more graphs 🙂
There is a bug I am aware of, but haven’t been able to track down yet – sometimes when you get to the game over screen, the stats arn’t sent to the server – I need to look into that. If it happens to you, if you could tell me at what time it happened ( and timezone you are in ) along with any notes ( I had collected exactly 666 copper ore , I self destructed ) that would be awesome.
Once more, you can find the game at : http://www.greenslimegames.com/games/spaceoreminer/
And enjoy, once more I am gagging for feedback, so feel free to comment here, or on my youtube channel : http://www.youtube.com/user/LamentConfigGSG
Or why not follow me and send me a tweet? http://twitter.com/GreenSlimeGames
lamentconfig