Hello everybody! Today, I'll be updating you all on what's going on, but first, I'd love to hear some suggestions or your thoughts on Dwarves Mining Idle.
Feedback
We've been getting some vague responses that say there's not much to do or it's "too barebones". Now this is below the 2 hour mark, so I'm assuming they want more to do at the beginning? I did an update not too long ago that made mining at the start faster, but I think some players don't want to idle literally at the beginning, even though it's an idler.
As I said, very vague and all I can do is guess what they mean or what they want at the beginning of the game. What's too barebones? What makes it boring? What's simple and basic about the game? I don't want to add holy grail of micro-managing since it's an Idler, something at the start that's meant to be ran in the background (when 1.0 comes out there will be offline progression, however) and as you progress you'll start to see more things to do.
A little backstory for Dwarves Mining Idle: We're two developers and we wanted to create something simplistic art-wise that would be cheap, but include a fair amount of content for players to enjoy Dwarves Mining Idle despite it's pixelated art-style. We released in Early Access to get the experience we both needed for working with Steam and how everything worked in that regard. We're trying our best to give everybody a great experience. However, with players giving us very vague responses that don't include much feedback or suggestions, it's hard to tell what we should do -- as I said all we can do is guess.
To counter the "slow-ness" of the game at the beginning to further cater to people that might think it's very slow, I'm going to remove 50 areas and create a dynamic tile health system that increases by +0.1 on floor reset. That way, players feel like they're progressing and it's not going to seem very slow, but also later on when X floor resets it will take a bit longer if you don't upgrade your Dwarves to compensate for the tile health. And, I'll remove Tile Health increasing based on Dwarves mining on that floor.
What do you think? Any other suggestions, feedback or constructive criticism? Would love to hear! 1.0 update is going to be VERY big with a lot of content and I want to get it all ready for its full release, but first I want to address this issue.
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The Surface - 1.0
I've been teasing things in our Discord for a couple weeks now. Here's what we have finished so far, and what we have left. I won't include it all since some is a surprise; however, there's so much to go through!
Performance
- Increased performance. I had enemies and tiles hiding when the camera wasn't near them and showing when it was, but after a few internal testing I found out it was causing more performance issues than doing good. Removed and everything is going even more smoothly now!
- Added a Load Manager. The world can become pretty big and so can the save file. Instead of everything loading all at once it'll take time its time to performantly load the world and everything in it.
Material and Area Changes
- Diamond will now have its rarity increased when you unlock more floors. Lower the floor, the higher spawn chance of Diamond. If you already have floors unlocked it'll calculate when you launch your game.
- Ore is no longer limited to specific areas. This was intended originally as a progression concept, but it ends up causing issues with ores like Diamond and Uranium to be mined less since they're already rare.
- Dirt will only spawn in the first area, and after that it'll be random based on rarity excluding area limitation.
Quality of Life
Working on some QoL to make life easier with the game.
Added a Dwarves Near window. There's quite a lot of Dwarves to manage. You can hover any Dwarf and it will show all Dwarves near with a quick button go-to instead of going to the Dwarves Window, selecting floor and finally getting to a dwarf you want to edit or look at. You can change Name, Behavior and View Skills within the Dwarves Near Window.
Placeables
- Completely reworked placeables to make them better and for myself because the code haunted me until I reworked everything.
- This rework of Placeables is basically a huge QoL visually and internally to perform better and had a lot of redundancies removed. Not only that, it made a dynamic room open for The Surface Placeables implementation.
So far I've only finished Workbench and Furnace. Lots more to take care of!
Workbench
- Alert saying "You must select a Dwarf to upgrade" even though you selected a Dwarf will no longer show after selecting a Dwarf.
- The item and Dwarf you're upgrading will no longer have its selection removed until you select a different item or dwarf. It did get pretty confusing if you still had an item or Dwarf selected after or before upgrading.
Furnace
- Added Text at the top showing you what the Furnace is smelting.
- Updated Fuel and Output texts and increased the font size.
- Replaced Output Timer and Fuel Timer texts with a progress bar.
Offline Calculation
Offline calculation is pretty much finished. Just needs some polishing to make sure everything is okay! But, you will receive Dwarf Levels, Area, Floor and Entity points while offline. Depend on Dwarves behavior when you close the game, you'll receive materials from Mining and Combat. AND if you have any placeables (Furnace, Crusher, etc) running it will smelt, crush and run offline.
Camera
Added some camera move and zoom limitations. I felt like the camera was a bit too free.
Dwarf
- Added NEW skills for Dwarves! We had new artwork for the Dwarves made months ago and they're finally being used! I had to come up with a concept on how to utilize these new dwarf look and animation. Decided to place them in the Skill Tree and they're valuable. Choose your Skill Trees how you want to build your Dwarves material grind!
Conclusion
That's is just the stepping stone on what to expect. There's more where that came from! Please consider giving us suggestions or feedback on Dwarves Mining Idle. We dislike having people quit too early when the grind and game does become better as you progress, you just have to keep mining and progressing! We want your experience to be the BEST. See you soon!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2220570/Dwarves_Mining_Idle/
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2731830/Real_Coin_Pusher/