At the beginning of this month I announced Ship Miner Early access release date and I want to share what is the plan to get into it as well as what I am working right now.
Before that though, I want to share some information about wishlists.
Participating in the LAGS Summer Game Fest Edition to announce the Early Access release date had a really positive impact in wishlists.
Basically, the game duplicated wishlists during the event, which is nuts, and completely out of my expectations. I am really happy with this result and super grateful they selected Ship Miner.
Here is the showcase presentation:
The game has more than 8k wishlists in Steam and the objective is to reach 10k before the EA release in November. Right now, it feels like a reasonable objective considering there is still time and the game will participate in October's Steam Next Fest. I will also continue submitting Ship Miner to other fests so with some luck if they accept it, that will also help in reaching that objective.
One thing that happened recently, like 4 days ago, is that for some reason someone resurrected the "This is the vibe I’m going for with my game" trend quoting my tweet and that started to get some traction again, and the game got around ~80 new wishlists during that time. Not a huge deal in terms of numbers but the important thing here is I did nothing, it was just automatic marketing and it felt awesome.
In general terms, I feel like the core mechanics: mining, exploring, upgrading feels pretty well while the combat needs more work. My idea is to get more depth in all aspects but the game will continue to be a mining game first.
I visualize the new combat elements to be more indirect, maybe going more to a tower defense/rts kind of game, like you build drones to attack enemies and space stations to defend, and maybe you can install some technologies to be better in combat but right now I don't want to add new controls for new attacks/abilities.
I am a huge fan of action games like Hades with multiple controls like dash, blocks, etc, but Ship Miner goes in another direction in my mind. The game can be completed since there is a win condition and even though it is not best right now, it works, and I will not change it for now. It will surely change in the future but I am not sure when nor how yet. My current focus is going to be on the meta game and late game, things that happen when you play over and over again. Some ideas I had for a long time now are unlocking different ships, having different game modes, and different starting conditions. And the other thing I will also focus is to get more depth on how the game changes by traveling. The asteroids procedural generation has a good base in my opinion and each time I add new content and/or new generation rules it feels it grows exponentially which makes me really happy with its state. The current roadmap to EA in broad terms is:
Unlock new content by playing different runs (for example: new ships, game modes and other in game content)
Localization in 3 to 4 languages (My current plan is English, Spanish, Japanese and Simplified Chinese), and during EA add more languages.
More customization and accessibility features.
More content in general, from enemies and other creeps to technologies and upgrades*
Visual effects and retro effects like scan lines, crt, etc, and palette customization.
The idea is to continue updating the Demo until the Steam Next Fest to have the best possible version before the EA, and for sure include Localization.
As I mentioned before, my focus for the next couple of updates will be on the metagame and late game, mainly define if I will unlock content by playing the game what that content will be and also identify and define the ways of starting in different conditions.
Based on this, my initial tests and what I am working right now, are around having different ships with different startup settings, different base stats and different max stats. Initially, the idea is that those will be unlocked during the run or after completing a run and then can be selected before starting a new one.
During the LAGS Summer Game Fest Edition I was checking youtube for reactions to see what they said Ship Miner. Most reactions I watched were ok, nothing crazy, but I accidentally started to find some small streamers playing the game.
I watched some of their videos and I noticed they tried to naturally play using keyboard for movement and mouse for aiming and they took some time to realize they needed to do all with the keyboard or switch to gamepad (mouse was only for UI in that version). I was delaying improving mouse controls to not unconsciously take decisions that could make the gamepad experience worse but after watching streamers I decided that I had to improve it sooner than later.
I recently did a demo update with mouse aiming support and improved support for big resolutions too. In my case I normally play in a 4k monitor and by default the game looked really big and couldn't customize it as I wanted (I had some cheats to fix it for me but needed to do something for players). Now the game autodetects a better game scale for those big resolutions and it looks better and it supports changing it in a better way.
I hope that both changes improve the experience for streamers.
That's all, thanks for reading!
And Remember to try the Demo and Wishlist!