Indie Developer seeks world domination
Well, just made my first YouTube video ever. It started out just as a test to check if the screen recorder and mic worked, but ended up being a gimp image prototype explaining the core gameplay of SpaceOreMiner.
So here we go, the first computer generated images of SpaceOreMiner 🙂
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Every name which is simple has already been used on the internet … d’oh! Or atleast it seems that way. As such, I’m going to rename my SpaceMiner to the slightly more obscure sounding SpaceOreMiner. Not wanting any law suits or what have you not. I was going to go with RoidRaider … but that gave me funny mental images of Lara Croft with one of those ring type seats. As such, I am just going to go through the posts and edit them to reflect the name change 🙂
Edit : Hopefully changed everything, if anyone has a suggestion for a better name, or indeed notices any references to just SpaceMiner, please comment 🙂
lamentconfigNow that I have decided on a space mining game, the next question is, what shall I be mining? After quite a lot of research on asteroid mining on Wikipedia, I had initially decided on sticking to real ores. Real metals that are definitely found in asteroids.
Then after some conversation with friends, the overall thought was that just mining known metals might be a little boring for the average gamer. This I conceded, after all Adamantium ( and even more so Adamantine 🙂 ) and Mithril are both fantastic made up ores. As the game itself is a sci-fi game, it allows my imagination to run quite wild with various ideas for ores to be found within an asteroid.
However, after looking at a long list of made up ores, there was a problem. How did I know which one would be more valuable than another? How do I even know what they are? They could just be made up strings for all I know ( well, they were, but you know … ). Generally, in the game the deeper you would go inside the asteroid, the rarer the ore, but there was no real world value attached to them. I couldn’t imagine if one tonne of kore would be as valuable as one tonne of copper. So I decided to combine both real world and made up ores. The real ones help show how much the made up ones are worth – everyone knows that gold is more valuable silver, and silver more valuable than copper, by inserting my made up ores between these, you can instantly see that Tyronic crystal is worth more/harder to find than copper. Lavatile in it’s ore form is not as rare as gold, but lavatile in crystal form is rarer than gold. Must be some pretty funky stuff!
Adding the real world ones in different places in the list instantly made it seem more real. These weren’t just random strings now, but had their place in an ore hierarchy of sorts. Seeing real metals/ores instantly creates a mental association – I guess that Dense Yeanite is similar to copper, silver and gold as they are on the same list. So below find my first set of ores for SpaceOreMiner. I would love to add hundreds of them, and then write detailed things about them, but, I have to remember my realisitic goals for the project. So currently, there are only 15. They are in order of value, from least to most.
Now that has been decided, I will need some physical characteristics, not really aimed at producing lore, more because I need to find some way to represent them in game 🙂 That should be fun!
tl:dr; I made some ores up.
lamentconfigOk, 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.
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