GreenSlimeGames

Heh, I should patent my amusing blog titles 🙂  Failing that, today has been a loooong dev session.  Won’t write much as I need to go and give some hugs to my kitten ( he has just been fixed and is a bit confused as to why with a large cone on his head he can’t get through small gaps ).  However, if you haven’t guessed from the title – today’s dev time has been spent making ores.  One or two extra ores,  well maybe three or four more.  Maybe even five.  Hmmm, now I come to think about it, six extra ores.

Well, actually, too be completely honest, I’ve doubled the number of named ores in the game 🙂

So the version 2.0 release will have 30 different ores to mine 😀  should make going deeper than 1000M much more interesting 😉  They are currently spawning in the same area as copper on active roids ( just for debugging ) – which means two minutes of playing netted me almost 2 million solaris.  Hehe.  Don’t worry folks, I’ll spread them around a bit more 😉 ( oh and I didn’t let the score save 😛 )

Also tweaked the mole movement a bit more, but thats boring compared to filling my lust for space ore! 🙂

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 🙂

Very keen to get thoughts and views on the models.  Vast improvement on what I had before methinks 🙂  Hopefully will get a release with the new graphics out this week.  There is a lot of tweaking that I need to do in game to make the models look their best 🙂  But alas, rl is hitting dev time quite hard at the moment  – but do not fear! your lust for asteroid mining with sparkly graphics will be fulfilled! 🙂

Well, kinda atleast.  I’ve noticed a few games where being submitted multiple times by the client.  Hadn’t done anything much about it, had only one real incident – most of the times the multi submitted games only happened with guests who had zero of everything.  Now that people are actually playing instead of just letting it load and then quiting, it has become a bit of an issue.

I went out for a quick a walk after starting to implement Mr. Shive’s awesome models, came back, and the top player was sitting on several gazzillion solaris.  Amazed at his skill, I just thought I would check the db, to see how he managed it.  Alas, the client had bugged out and submitted his last game about 15 times.  D’oh.  Trust a Redditor to break the system 🙂

So to fix the issue asap, I traced the problem and released a new version of the game.  Hopefully it fixes it, if you do notice your games being submitted several times, please let me know.  I’ve just cleaned the database out of all duplicate games – bit dangerous to do as I don’t want to alienate anyone, but I would rather have a nice fair system, without my glitchy code 🙂

I’ve noticed actually a lot of my games under the LamentConfig account had been duplicated a lot, after this purge my score has taken somewhat of a pounding – d’oh! 🙂