I always thought that a cool mini-game would be a team based Mr Driller style thing, but the blocks don't crush you and you have to line up the ores in groups, then everyone who participated got a percentage of what was mined based on their performance. Or a bonus. Something like that.

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Original post by thk123 What if you had small, easily identifiable pockets of resources which you could use at the start. Then, scale it. Ie, the harder it is to read the clues, the more there will be. This could be quite an easy way to teach the player to read the signs.

I agree with this, although I'm thinking that clues are going to partly reveal themselves based on some RPG skill or equipment level. I don't think you can make a puzzle these days that won't appear as a screenshot on some website with all the answers revealed (meaning what's the point of trying to make it challenging?)

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One thing worth remembering is this could seriously unbalance any multiplayer aspects if the pro can easily spot huge deposits of resources that the noob can't even recognise.

No multiplayer sadly, so no problem.

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Original post by DarkHorizon If he wastes time/drillbits/widgets digging where he shouldn't, it's his own fault for not R'ing TFM.

Yes or a quick in game tutorial or location which gives them the hint that there's more to mining than just picking up the easily identifiable stuff you can see.

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Original post by kru I think that prospecting is one of the things you either have to go all out with, or make very simple.

Agreed and I especially take your point about spamming a key (I remember that from the old Doom days: You'd run around pushing the D key while running into walls looking for secret doors and your guy would be grunting every time-- it was very bizarre)

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One of the keys features of a great game is the ability to play it without reading the manual.

To a point, yes. You should be able to play it but I don't know that you should be able to play it well. I refused to read the manual for Civilization when it first came out, and for the first dozen games I played I always ended up with tanks rolling over my primitive spearmen simply because I didn't realize you could do some very basic things.

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Most games that feature 'dig to find treasure' systems don't provide many useful clues as to where to dig, or they make it a silly game of hot & cold which quickly is forgotten about.

What about a gambling analogy where the site is simply quantified by one or more variables that come down to chance? There's two parts to this:

1) Whether or not the game makes the site obvious (I was proposing not, that you have to learn to look, although I'm now thinking of mixing this with an in game skill so that certain clues don't even appear until you reach a skill level)

2) Once you find the site, whether or not it's worth your time

#2 is really thorny because anything that doesn't come with a fairly well developed, repeatable challenge (like combat famously has) is easy to make tedious. If #1 could be randomized, then MAYBE the challenge part is taken care of because it would fall into the puzzle category. #2 I feel should draw from gambling games in terms of philosophy, in that most of the time you just get okay rewards but often enough you get huge payoffs. I think this is the sort of recipe that makes for gameplay that's addictive (in a positive way).

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A good implementation would need a lot of information, or a good strategy to tutor the player. I'm told that gold is found more often at river-bends. OK. Say I'm looking at a map with 3 distinct river bends, but I can only place down 2 mines. How do I know which river bend has a greater chance of having gold than the others? What clues does the player look for? It seems like a potentially complex topic that would require a lot of training on my part. If prospecting was one of the core features of the game, I might focus on it enough to learn the subtleties of it. But, if its a small feature, its probably better to just boil my odds down to a number.

EXCELLENT point.

I have a HUGE underlying problem that I'm trying to puzzle out in this and a few other posts: If you can explore multiple, randomly generated planets is there any gameplay to be had other than combat or vehicle simulation?

Trying to make a sort of puzzle / gambling mechanic out of mining is one stab at it, because I can at least say "no matter where you go, there'll be mining." It's logical, it makes sense, it just has to be fun. (The alternative is Diablo in a tank, which maybe be the route I have to take).

Out of curiosity, if you had combat as a means of making money / leveling and fairly detailed prospecting gameplay, what would you need out of the prospecting gameplay to make it worth your while?

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Original post by Codeka I like how it worked in The Settlers.

Yes, I can see this working well for a more RTS type game, where your prospector could potentially be lost. But if you WERE the prospector... [smile]

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Original post by BLiTZWiNG I like responding to your posts with examples from Star Wars: Galaxies. Such an awesome game.

Thanks BLiTZWiNG, I think I missed out not being able to play that.

I like that you had to differentiate what you were looking for. I've been thinking of something similar with configuring your mining vehicle, though I'm not so sure.

One idea was that you have different tools / cargo hold types for different classes of material. What detects/holds ores doesn't work for gases, for instance, and I would even break up the detectors and containers so that they straddle different mining categories (so you choose among containers for easy gases or radioactives but detectors covers some radioactives and gases but not others).

So I'm aiming for that same strategic deliberation that it sounds like you had to take on in SWG, although MAYBE with a bit more detail.

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You set the range on the survey tool, then ask it to survey for a specific type of resource (copper, aluminium etc). It comes back with a grid of %'s in [range] distance from you that indicate basically how much of the resource is in each grid point. Grid points are around 8m at 64m survey range.

Did you have to spend a resource for each query? If not, can you imagine it being a pain if you would have had to (kind of like spending mana to cast a magic detection spell is what I'm thinking).

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If the resource is over 20% I think it is you can attempt to get a sample. You can then also place resource harvesters.

Harvesters actually sound very cool. I imagine that you went out planting harvesters and then came back collecting stuff from them (or was this automatic)?

Also, could harvesters become attacked or otherwise vulnerable to outside forces? Sounds like room for some additional gameplay.

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Original post by loufoque I don't find it to be a very nice system, however. It would be better if you could dig anywhere and just see what you get. Ideally, it shouldn't depend on luck either. Ore should just be in some parts of the geometry, and once you take a part of the ore vein, that part is not there anymore. You'd probably need a fully destructible world with a voxel engine to do that well, however.

Fully destructable voxel world is definitely outside my resouce limits (wonder why we haven't seen it yet from the AAA titles? Red Faction had a bit of it, but nobody cloned it)

In terms of random / luck, do you think it makes a difference if the terrain is randomly generated? Resources would be distributed based on whatever rules that correspond to the clues, but it would all still be random.

Dwarf Fortress has some of this -- certain types of materials can be found in certain areas. Allow me to share a couple of my frustrations with the mechanism, all of which should be avoidable:



1) Trying to find regions which contained multiple materials I was looking for was extremely time consuming, since searching worked by e.g. sedmentary layer types. It's quite time consuming to check if each of, say, 5 materials, each of which has, say, 5 possible layer types it can show up in, are all found in this region which contains this other list 5 layer types.

This is much less of an issue if you have easy enough access to trade of sufficient volume, or making the game resource rich enough that finding something locally is (nearly a) given. Constantly buying out all the iron bars off the local dwarven caravan and not having supply increase is annoying.

2) Zero clues beyond general region, as to where materials are or aren't.

The important mineral/ore veins that you wanted to mine were always in the middle of your elaborately planned out living areas in dwarf fortress. Simple warning mechanisms like coming across trace amounts of a material before striking the important veins would alleviate some of this. Think warm/cold mechanisms. "Nothing worthwhile here, I can build my peasant housing blocks!"

The more the quantity the less important the warning, although someone with OCD tendencies will still find it annoying (e.g. me) to waste anything.



Guess that's all I have at the moment... I like the idea at least.

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Original post by Cpt Mothballs I always thought that a cool mini-game would be a team based Mr Driller style thing, but the blocks don't crush you and you have to line up the ores in groups, then everyone who participated got a percentage of what was mined based on their performance. Or a bonus. Something like that.

Haha, it's funny I've been thinking about something similar even though it would be goofy. Have you ever played Motherlode? It's got a similar bent in that it's a side scroller where you're running around digging paths under Mars in a combo helicopter/drilling rig, but the terrain is fixed and you have to be smart about how you drill because you can't drill up, only left / right and down. It's pretty addictive.

I started a prototype clone last year and made a decent amount of progress. From time to time I toy with having a top down / isometric view for surface mining and then these special spots that are subterranean side scroller underworlds.

(Then I try to expand on my existing proto and swear/cry about how hard that is to do. Sobers me up. [grin])

Yeah, I have played that actually, but the trouble is it's non-continuous.

I'm not sure about the rest of your game but I think that the mining in a specific area should be continuous, for however long someone wants to.
Or a set period of time in which the player must drill before the terrain collapses and you have to restart.

I'm not too sure, really. But I think a mix of the two would be pretty interesting.

The idea of finding minerals based on clues and knowledge sounds interesting. It would work well I think if the rarity of the mineral was tied directly into how obvious the mineral was to find.

Coal (ultra common) deposits might be visible from the surface
Iron Ore (common) can be identified by areas of reddish hue on the surface.
Pexite Crystals (ultra rare) can only be found in systems with K7VI type stars on Venus class worlds. Located in high density pockets of iron ore that exhibit methane blooms.

Skill and equipment could make different characteristic more visible and some shouldn't appear until you have the prerequiste skill level augmented by equipment.