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To talk to me, you can usually find me on irc.afternet.org at #ludumdare under the nick the31.

I’ve been pretty caught up in college stuff lately, but I’ve managed to get something to show for Lodebot. As the title says, it’s just the basics.

The player ship, shown digging, has just left the main base. The minerbot should be familiar, but I hope to introduce a few new game mechanics in this post. All game art in the screenshot is temporary.

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I’ve been busy with school, jobs, other projects for a while now. I’ll continue to be busy, too, but I thought I’d take a little time to outline where I hope to take Minerbot 2.

First of all, the game’s undergoing another remake, this time in Haxe. This way, there’s a good chance of an Android version, and maybe even a downloadable standalone version. (The game will still primarily be for Flash, though.) Haxe also lets me leverage some more familiar and powerful syntax. Combined with NME, I can actually keep a lot of my code, with minor syntactic changes.

The change in language isn’t the only reason I’m remaking Minerbot again, though. I have other reasons.

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Finished another Ludum Dare! The theme this time around was Tiny World, which I satisfied in Hero of Rain by placing the world within a raindrop.

The fall is near its end.

See the Ludum Dare competition entry. This fleshes out some of the plot and describes the controls (although they are presented in-game), so it would be wise to go here.

Directly to the game.

Just a little update on how Minerbot 2 is going. I’ve been working on the asteroid generation system, trying to add a little variety. In an earlier post, I linked an image of the basic asteroid… basically just three hardness levels of rock in a circular asteroid shape. Now I’ve put veins of ore in that rock, so there’s actually a point!

There are four types of ore vein so far:

• Radial — A vein oriented along the radius of the asteroid.
• Stratum — Aligned along the circumference of the asteroid, as if it was a layer as the asteroid formed.
• Crystalline — I’ll probably be going back to fix this one up, but it’s supposed to look like the ores were in a crystal sort of formation.
• Deposits — Sort of fill in the gap between rock strength layers, as if when a certain layer of the asteroid was completely formed the ore in question settled into place on the outside.

Examples of all the vein types can be seen here if you look closely.

A few people I’ve shown this to were confused about what this image represents. This is a debug map of a 2d asteroid, which represents ores and rocks as different colors. Note that in-game, the asteroid will NOT look like this, rather, a tilemap is assembled using these colors as a sort of key.

Looking forward to starting gameplay!

So far I haven’t really said much about what Minerbot 2 is about. Hopefully this will clear things up a little bit.

The most important thing to note is that Minerbot 2 is not an incremental update on the original. This is a completely new game, the only obvious similarities being the mining probes and tile size relative to the player.

With that out of the way, here’s what I have in mind:
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It has been a very, very long time since I’ve talked about this, but I have some things to say.

After making Minerbot, I started thinking of improvements for Minerbot as it was, but those never got anywhere.

Then I made Secretnet for another Mini Ludum Dare compo. Did great (by my standards), also deserving a sequel. But I started my summer internship and didn’t get much done.

Now, much later, I’m in college. Right now Minerbot 2 is slightly ahead, and I’m focusing what little effort I have on it. It took me a while to decide on this–my few fans on Kongregate push for both sequels just about equally, it seems. Finally I decided on Minerbot 2 because it would (hopefully) not require as much polished content as Secretnet 2.

A screenshot of the current version, just for kicks.

Heading into finals week soon, so I don’t expect to get any work done in the immediate future. However, I do think I’ll get some stuff done during winter break.

I also might post a little feature addition list for Minerbot 2 before then.

So, I’ve already put Secretnet on Kongregate. It has done pretty well for the two days it’s been up, and at the moment holds #2 in the Saturday-to-Saturday contest. Interestingly, another text adventure holds #1. In any case, Secretnet will likely soon be displaced by other games later in the week, but it is fun to hold a spot on the front page.

So, what about Secretnet’s future? I’m thinking about making a sequel.
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Woot! From this handy image that I’m hotlinking from here, you can see that Secretnet did well in the minild:

And congratulations to everyone else who participated, too! Fun times.
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Another Ludum Dare event, another game.

This one, the Mini Ludum Dare #27, had the theme of all talk, as well as a phrase that was suggested be included in each game: “I think we can work something out…”

So, I made Secretnet. It’s an adventure game that takes place inside a fake IRC client. It’s short, so instead of writing a description that would likely take longer for you to read than to play the game, I’ll just give you a link to the competition entry page:

(Click on the image. Or here. I made the text a link because people usually look for text links and assume image links go to bigger versions of images. Anyway, just click one or the other, and you’ll be fine.)

Now I’ll get back to work on Minerbot 2.

I’ve been really busy lately, but it looks like I’ll have a lot of free time soon to work on stuff. First, I decided I’d post a little about Minerbot’s sequel.

First off, Minerbot was a bigger success than I thought it would be. It’s a shame nobody took the chance to sponsor it–too bad. Thanks to this game, I was able to earn enough money on Kongregate to finally receive it a month after the end of this month.

After the break, information about the sequel. Read the rest of this entry »