Demo Announcement Video

I’ve just released the Demo of Ship Miner :rocket: Weeee!!! But, does that means the game is almost done? No, it is far from over. In this blogpost I will explain what happened from the last Roadmap update, the new importance for having a Demo and the updated Roadmap.

In a previous post I explained that one of the reasons for having a Demo was to start getting feedback of the game. My mental plan at that time was to release it by the end of June but that didn’t happen. However, while working for the Demo I decided to start a private Playtest in mid July and it kinda covered the initial feedback reason pretty well.

The private Playtest ended up having 490 subscribers (today data) where around 184 of those players actually played the game. From those, some of them joined Discord to share feedback and ideas, others filled the feedback form, others sent me emails and some of them even recorded videos and shared to me. It was so awesome and I am so grateful :pray:.

My evaluation is that, in general, it was a good feedback and most of it aligned with my vision for the game. It also helped me confirming some of the game strengths and weaknesses so I can attack them more focused now.

Ended up having some players really addicted like me :heart:

From those numbers I believe there are some important things to understand and fix but also the game shows potential to play a lot, even without having too much content and without some other features, so I have space to work on.

At some point I wasn’t sure anymore about having a Demo since the players from the playtest were helping me so much but at the same time after analyzing the reasons for having a Demo and also taking advice from others I decided to publish a Demo with the objectives of participate in festivals, contact content creators and also reach a broader audience to get even more feedback.

It is a great milestone and I am super happy with it :beers:.

Roadmap

The game is far from being done. From the last time I shared the current state, I was wondering if the game should be more base building in one asteroid or keep the travel to asteroids, among other things. Well, I ended up deciding to keep the original plan of traveling from asteroid to asteroid and deciding destinations and also having some minimal base building in each asteroid. However, the destination selection is not in the Demo right now because I had no time to make it as I wanted. The good thing is that the game right now shares the general experience in terms of mood, controls, feelings, etc, so it still makes sense to have it public for everyone while I continue working on the rest of the features.

So the current roadmap includes now:

  • Destination selection (this includes making interesting changes among asteroids)
  • More content (enemies with different patterns, more technology, different ships to start the game)
  • Game modes (custom, sandbox, etc)
  • Localization in at least 4 languages.
  • More options to customize game.
  • Accessibility features
  • Achievements
  • Retro visual effects like scanlines, crt, etc.
  • Better Savegame System (continue where you were)
  • Mouse support

What about the private Playtest

(Some players asked what I am going to do with the Playtest, so I added this section.)

Before the Demo was published, the idea of the private Playtest was to test the build for the Demo, so once I published it I removed the join Playtest button. However, my plan for the private Playtest is to continue using it but now to test the final game itself. I will re activate the join Playtest button on Steam for players wanting to continue playing and testing the real game, they can join there or by asking me for a key on Discord. The Demo will continue getting some feature related updates, and maybe some content updates too.

I am still unsure on how much time I need to complete the game considering I am working part time on it, right now I feel like I need at least 6 months more to have the game close to the state I want to.

Again, I want to thank so much all to the playtesters for taking time to play the game and give me feedback, it means a lot to me :beers:.

Thanks for reading.