Update 2

Hello! It's been far too long since the last update to Itch. I've have been busy with work and college. Anyway, Update 2 is a large one and it brings Events. I tried to model the events after Kirby Air ride so keep that in mind while playing. Right now, there are 3 events:

1. Rich Resources
   1. Large resources begin spawning around the map that drop more raw resources than normal.
2. Random Minecart (Missing Art)
   1. A minecart starts to tumble around in the cave and the players must break it open to see what's inside!
3. Cave In
   1. Rocks start randomly falling from the ceiling and smashing anything they fall on to, even other resources!

With the addition of events, I also went ahead and added in a few more things. Controller Rumbling is the other big thing that has been added. Now when a player interacts with the environment or picks stuff up, their controller will give them some feedback. This has increased the overall engagement of Metal Miners and I couldn't be happier. I went ahead and added in new art like the health bar and some new particles that try to simulate depth with a parallax effect. Believe it or not, the particles are fake. I went into photoshop and created a 1080p image of dots then I used that image in the game to simulate depth. So basically there's 2 sprite renderers that are parallaxing. The images just look like particles when they actually aren't. I'm pretty proud with how they turned out.

The plan for the future is looking great. I have a long list of things to do yet but, the end goal is to upload this game to Steam and Xbox hopefully in the coming months. The current planned features are as follows (no particular order):

1. Implement AI to play against to allow for single player games.
2. Create Spider AI to participate in the Spider Assault event.
3. Make crafting tier based. This will make the players only able to mine resources one tier up from what they have. For example, a copper pickaxe cannot mine a rock and get diamond (right now you can do this. I want to make it so you cannot). A copper pickaxe will only be able to mine Iron at most.
4. Add in decorations for the cave to seem more "mine-like".
5. Create more maps for the game. I'm aiming for 6 at launch.
6. Hire someone to create custom music for the game.
7. Recreate the win screen and the leaderboard

This is the list of main things I want to do before launch. I have recently been thinking about the design of the goal of the game. I am unsure if I want to keep the goal of the game as "Craft the Golden Pickaxe". There has to be a better and more enjoyable goal for the players to pursue. I have noticed in my playtesting that the game plateaus once the players craft diamond gear. It isn't because they cannot get the resources though. It's because players seem to enjoy fighting each other (which is understandable) and there's a lot of resources that get tossed between players because of it. This stops the goal from being attainable for quite a long time. My hope though, is that the events change the flow of the game a bit. 

Anyway, this concludes the massive update. I will do my best to post all the bugfixes I did as well. Enjoy!

• Bugfixes
  • Player death caused Rocks to spawn instead of resources
  • Sometimes players could strike resources on the ground instead of rocks
  • Dynamite now does infinite damage
  • Resources spawning outside of the map