1870 in about 4 minutes, huh? That's not such a good score, but I did get down quite a bit quicker now with the pregeneration of extra tunnels, and while at first I thought the quicker/more slippery vertical boost controls was a troubling factor, I then thought about it and it's a fair trade off for how much quicker you can escape from there. Gold clusters tend to generate better this go, too; and the other items are helpful without breaking the game.
So what's next on your to-do list?
Finish exams, that's what.
I'll be back to coding tomorrow, and I'll probably start with finishing up the menu and getting more of the stuff around the game in- highscores tables and all that junk. Then, the stuff I have left on the checklist: Sound effects, music, prettying things up with stalagtites and maybe more sky colours/grass colours on the surface to make things more interesting, energy crystals, fossils, orbital drill, and stone strengths. Then polish and release. After release, I'll probably add a bunch more ambitious features in (things I dream of doing): water, old ruins, creatures, online play...
I've also thought of two ways to branch it post release:
A) Persistent planet on an online server. Build machines designed to extract minerals from the bowels of the earth, protect your supplies and machinery from rival companies, and plumb the depths with your friends.
B) A metagame that's a hybrid of this mining game and my old half-finished game Bitrocket. Fly through space dodging meteors, land on a planet, strip mine it of its gold, plant explosives in its center, blow it up, fly around the planet collecting flying gold, upgrade stuff with the money you get, rinse and repeat.
But both of those are just dreams.
Anyway, further elaboration on the features I have yet to add before release:
- Sound effects and musics will be outsourced, grabbed from whatever wonderful musician I may find near the end of the development.
- I'm not sure how I'll pretty things up, but I just want to make things not look boring.
- Energy crystals will be ores in the walls much like gold (but rarer) that may entirely replace the batteries found in chests as an energy source.
- Fossils will be things that require gentle extraction: You'll have to dig out an area around them before they'll be beamed up, netting you a large sum of money for the trouble. They crumble easily if disturbed.
- The orbital drill I have explained a few times before, but it will be the last tool and quite rare. You'll probably start with one as a simple shortcut to get down to the nearest cavern.
- Stone strengths will increase as you go lower, and you'll have to find more powerful drills in special chests to be able to dig these greater strengths. Of course, gold will be more common in the stronger rock as a reward.
Oh, I'll also probably make the top terrain more interesting with one-dimensional perlin noise to determine tile height (a wonderful idea from a
fellow mining game). Also, I'll bump up the minimum height for cave creation, meaning that more cave mouths will show up on the surface for easier exploration. I miss the feeling of crashing through a thin surface into a cave.
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