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.

Recently, I noticed that I’ve lost a lot of motivation for the project. The features I was trying to implement felt like random stuff that didn’t belong in Minerbot, and I found myself putting limits on a few things that made the original fun.

So I decided to go back to the roots of Minerbot. In a cave system, mining huge veins of ore with collectors. Fun! But why?

After some thinking, I think I’ve found what I can do to keep Minerbot 2 fun: give myself a guiding principle–perhaps inspired by the themes of Ludum Dare competitions. I think this theme is “risk and reward”. I need to make the risks apparent, and the rewards compelling.

In the original Minerbot, I think this came through in the placement of collectors. Ideally, the player scouts out a few ore veins, and places collectors on the ones they believe to be the largest, using a limited number of collectors to get the largest quantity of the most valuable ore. The reward is the grand reveal of what the collector will collect–sometimes a huge amount of ore, sometimes a stomach-turning speck.

Poor collector placement.

Expanding on this concept of risk and reward, I reintroduce something I had tried to work in earlier: combat. This time I think I’ve made it fit the theme of Minerbot more appropriately. When finding a cave system to mine, the player is shown threat levels, corresponding to the number of enemies that are predicted to be in each cave system. Bodyguards can then be hired to protect you for the duration of that mining trip, or you can try to outrun the enemies and hide. By selecting a level without getting bodyguards, you risk losing a minerbot, but if you hire bodyguards you risk wasting your money when you could have hid instead.

Another mechanic I’m pretty sure about is the purchase of asteroid rights. After upgrading, you get a choice of asteroids to mine next. You are presented with a few different asteroids and cave systems, each with different threat levels and ore distributions. They are priced according to the likelihood of there being a lot of valuable ore within, perhaps with the worst of them being free in case your funds have gone dry. This resembles the excitement of buying an unopened geode–you pay for the size and the probability of success, and only after can you open it and see what you’ve got.

And although this is the change I think I’ve been most clear on since my first remake, I’ll restate it as well: at least for the career game mode, I’m going with the traditional flash game upgrade -> play level -> upgrade -> play level model.

The game flow illustrated.

I’ll also keep the current Minerbot play mode, which is just a single round for high scores. I’m hoping to make the generator more flexible, for fairer levels in this mode.

Oh yes, I almost forgot: the new name!

How about Lodebot?

A quick googling doesn’t show any obvious conflicts, but if you can think of any, please leave a comment. Or leave a comment if you think it’s just stupid. Oh, or leave a comment for any other reason, too!

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.

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!

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:

• Upgrade system
• Gives a reason to gather ore.
• Presents a way to progress in the game.
• Adds to replayability.
• High score mode
• Provides a place for a classic mode to bring back the Minerbot cave style.
• Allows for timed competition between players.
• Combat
• Gives the player an adversary other than time.
• Makes encounters more interesting.
• Creates a need for bodyguards, or ship-mounted weaponry.
• Minerbot Health and Energy
• An additional risk for mining the asteroids.
• Allows limitations for various new tools.
• Additional tools
• Lets the player interact in more varied ways with the environment.
• Graphical upgrades
• Makes the game more intuitive for newcomers, and allows for more ore types.
• Creates a more immersive environment.

There are many more ideas where these came from, but these are the ones I’m farily sure will be used. I think that this genre shift from arcade to action/RPG make Minerbot 2 a much more compelling game.

Here, for example, is the basic asteroid form that a new prototype generator outputs.

An asteroid body created by the new generator, before ores are placed.

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, what about Secretnet’s future? I’m thinking about making a sequel.

It seems a little odd to commit to a sequel for Secretnet when I’m already working on one for Minerbot, but people have said they want them and I agree. In Minerbot’s case, I want to make a sequel that properly explores the concept of collectors with more long-lasting fun. For Secretnet, I feel kind of guilty–as if I didn’t make the story long enough, and I owe people the content.

Why I won’t just write new branches and content into the same engine:

This would be great, right? I could just take what I have, add on branches, write more lines, improve the gui a little bit, and I’d be done. Right?

Unfortunately not. The engine is quite buggy, but even worse is the way it stores data. Instead of some sort of tree or map form (or anything else you would expect from a branching dialogue system) the data is stored like this. If you’re too scared to click through the link (you should be!) I put it on its side and fit it to the article for you.

Here’s that little peek at the data:

There is one other data file–it links between different topics and keywords, and uses a similar formatting. It only has about 1/4 of the lines as the speech file, but that’s also just too big.

This would be fine if this was a linear game. For example, if this was a modern first-person shooter and all I was doing was adding linearly-executed dialogue. This works great for that. The problem is that I’m not doing anything like that–to write a branching game with this format you have to use the text editor’s find command on keywords to feasibly get things done. It was a massive pain, and soaked up a lot of time when I was working on it during the MiniLD.

Now you see why I don’t want to just start adding branches to the current system to make a sequel. That would be torture. I need to rewrite this, no matter what.

After I overhaul the engine, I have two basic ways to move forwards in the plot.

Option 1: Fill in the original

This would be neat, if I can convert my old data to the new format. Then I could just add more branches, and not worry about creating a whole new storyline and any new characters.

Option 2: Continue the story

I like this idea too. My first thought for a sequel was to bring in some new narrator, with a shock plot twist. That would be very fun, and in fact completely changes the meaning of Secretnet’s 100% ending. You’ll see what I mean if I make the sequel with this option.

Either way, I look forward to continuing the game. Secretnet was fun to write, and I can’t wait to write more without the frustration of looking through a gigantic text file to do it.

And congratulations to everyone else who participated, too! Fun times.

Now I plan on re-releasing Secretnet onto Kongregate, after a few tweaks. Instead of being all secretive about it though, here’s a list of what I plan on adding:

• Log-viewing upon a loss. Someone requested this, so I asked myself “why not?” and started implementing it. Now I can answer “because programming a proper scroll bar isn’t as trivial as I thought.”
• A little ambient music in the background. I might not actually do this, but it’s a goal.
• Integrate the Kong API. Doesn’t really affect the game, but lets the Kong people add badges if they like the game enough. That would be nice.

(This list also an attempt to make you less angry at me for being secretive about my next non-Minerbot 2 game.)

If you have been unfortunate enough to have not played Secretnet yet, you can find it here.

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.

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.

Now I thought I’d list a few things that I (and others, thanks commenters) thought Minerbot did well:

• Offer a sense of exploration when digging through the world.
• Let the player make bets, and reveal the reward effectively.
• Use simplistic graphics to display the world.
• Allow the player to dig through and modify the environment.

The easier part is pointing out areas where Minerbot faltered:

• Gameplay is very repetitive.
• There it little to no challenge when playing the game.
• If you play well, the map is clear of ore by the end, making it solely up to chance.
• Graphics are impossible to interpret if colorblind.
• There is no reason to play the game other than high scores.
• Progression and advancement aren’t present in any form except player skill, which increases very rapidly to a shallow peak.
• The world is somewhat small.

When making the sequel, first of all I thought of upgrades. I knew I wanted to put these in even before I released Minerbot originally, but I knew it would take too much time to massage the Minerbot code to let me do that.

Upgrades are a staple of Flash gaming, in my mind. Here, just four examples of games I’ve played recently that use this tactic:

A few screenshots of games that have upgrades. These are just the first four I found--there are many, many more.

• Short play sessions, where you only go through the cycle a few times.
• Intuitive save points. If you quit before a “play” stage is completed, you can expect to lose your progress, although because play stages can be short saving still happens comfortably often.
• A simple way to implement progression in the game.
• Retain players. They have something to come back for to keep working on.

This is perfect for Minerbot. The worlds can be short, and upgrades are natural to the genre. Upgrades are a perfect fit.

I’ll also add in some new upgradeable items, of course, to add more to the mix. More about that later.

• A change in setting
• New character art and capabilities
• A storyline

Here’s hoping that the sequel will be of much higher quality than the original!

(Hehe, bulleted lists are fun.)

Have fun!