Research into other games

Before I start the development on my project, I thought it would be a good idea to look into other games. Part of the inspiration for Mini Miner came from the game “Motherload”, a game that I used to play a lot in my teenage years. It was an epic game for it’s time, and all the kids at school had played it at least once. So as research for my project I decided to play it to look at some of the core elements of gameplay. While performing my playtest, I asked myself questions such as “What made this game so fun?” and “What mechanics are vital to this game’s success?”.

As the Player in this game, you are in charge of controlling a small mining ship. The game is fast-paced from the get-go, with the Player starting with the most minimal fuel. Fuel drains at a steady rate over time, but it’s not the only thing to be careful of. Flying down a hole and hitting the ground too hard incurs damage to the hull and hitting it too hard even blows the ship up in an instant. The main idea of the game is to mine ores, sell them at the shop to upgrade your ship, allowing you to mine further and further down. Some rocks block the way and require explosives to move. As you get further into the game, ores become harder to mine unless you upgrade the drill. The Player is notified at certain levels of depth that they are getting closer and closer to the Motherload via a transmission, and once you reach it (spoiler alert) there is an epic boss fight.

So, to quickly summarise: The Player must upgrade their ship as they go, be wary of fall damage, fuel usage and cargo capacity, all while heading towards one goal: hitting the motherload. I believe the what keeps the fun in this game is the requirement to manage many mechanics at once. The further you go, the harder it gets and so the higher the risk. But in this game risk really does equal reward.

Discussing my Options – Part 2

Last week I ruled out the options that I had proposed. This week I have started to flesh out the possible ideas for my mining game. The name ‘Mini Miner’ instantly sprung to mind, I think it’s a well-suited name for the project, so from now on I’ll be referring to it as that.

The first goal this week was to flesh out ideas for the game. This helps me to recognize key aspects of the game; as well as determining whether it’s a viable choice for development. The first aspect that I determined was the start and end game i.e. where would the game start? What is the end game?

This then led me onto the question: “What challenges would the player encounter along the way?”. This drew the conclusion that I would look at either designing some AI, or some sort of death mechanic. I decided that the main goal of the game would be for the player to mine down and must reach a certain depth and find the “Motherload” – this would be the main goal of the game. To add a challenge element to the game, I will implement a timer which acts as ‘high score’ mechanism for the game. The idea is to find the motherload in the fastest time possible.

This however didn’t seem adequate. I decided that each ore would have its own characteristics such as varying amounts of health and value. There’s also the possibility of implementing a shop where the player could sell their ores, although I don’t know how much of a challenge this would be. Upon developing a game previously in Unreal Engine, I implemented a stamina mechanic. This acts as the player’s ‘Energy level’ and drains slowly over time, and it was a mechanic that I was fond of, therefore I have chosen it would be suitable for this game too.

Discussing my options - Part 1

Over the course of the past week I have investigated my options. The mining game seemed like the most appealing for a few reasons, these of which I will explain below.

Firstly, my artistic skills are shall we say... lacking. Creating a 3D game would require modelling my own assets, this is an idea that I'm not at all comfortable with, given the time frame of my project. I don't want to bite off more than I can chew, so going with a 2D game will make modelling and animating a lot simpler. Not only do the assets require less artistic skills, but I won't need to worry about animating them as well. This rules out the option of creating a third / first person shooter.

To go hand-in-hand with this, my research over the past week into the game engines has revealed some interesting results. Unity Engine more widely supports my decision of this mining game as they have great support 2D sprites and animation. There are also talks about implementing tile-map support, which would help a great deal.

The MOBA was ruled out when I realised how complex of a job that would be. A lot of the mechanics in a MOBA require a lot of development time, as well as the fact that I am going to be learning a new programming language, this would simply be too complex. Looking at League of Legends as an example, this game has some extremely complex mechanics, and in order to get the game to a suitable point of completion would seem to be asking too much.

In summary, I have decided to go with the mining game. This option stands out because of the tremendous support Unity has for developing it, as well as C# being a language that I would love to learn.

My First Post

Welcome to my Project blog. All of the following posts will show the process of my thoughts for my project.

At this point I know that I would like to create a game. Options that I have drawn up are as follows:

A MOBA (Multiplayer Online Battle Arena).

A shooter in either first or third person.

A web based game, possibly something similar to the popular MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online  Role Playing) Runescape.

A 2D mining game, where the player has to mine rocks to reach an end goal, of which has been undecided yet.

I am currently unsure what software I am going to use to create my game, but my options are between Unreal Engine and Unity. I am fairly familiar with Unreal Engine, but I would definitely need to do quite a bit more research in order to create a fully-fledged game. I have worked with Unreal Engine before, but only visual scripting. Taking on this project I know that whichever option I choose, I would like to do programming. Unity offers programming in either C# or Java Script, whereas Unreal Engine using C++. All three are great languages to program in, although I believe that Java Script would be the most difficult for me.

The inspiration for a MOBA comes from my passion for playing League of Legends. I realise that this would be a massive undertaking, but I think it could be a great idea. The general mechanics that I would have to design is a few player characters, at least 4 which each have a unique set of abilities that they can cast. AI bots known as 'minions' travel along a designated path until they come across an enemy, which at that point they will fight them. The objective of the game would be to destroy the structure at the end of the path.

My second idea, the shooter, comes from the fact that I've always wanted to create a survival type shooter. At this point it's unknown whether I would look to develop it as a typical survival game, or as a waved-based zombie horde shooter, but this is the general consensus.

A game such as Runescape is one that I was very fond of in my teenage years. I believe that a project of a similar type of game would be exciting -it would give me an insight into how one of my favourite games was created. I feel like this project might not be too difficult, but highly dependent on how quickly I managed to grasp whichever software program I plan to use.

Mining games are in short supply, there are very few out there which solely focus on just mining their  game that actually feature extensive content. 2D means that the graphics would be easy to develop, and it would give me a chance to be more creative seeing as I could spend more time on programming and less on artwork.