Prison Miner 1.5.0 - One Year Anniversary

Prison Miner released on steam exactly 1 year ago today, and with that comes a large graphical overhaul for the environment and UI across the whole game. Whilst I would've liked to add content within this update I was lacking on time, which is further expanded upon in the "Where next?" section of this post. Whilst I couldn't release any content with this, I knew I had to celebrate the year anniversary of this game somehow, so as well as this update comes our biggest sale yet of 50% off

Changes

• Improved sprites in all areas

• Redesigned every area

• Shapeless mines (no longer is every mine a boring old square)

• New fonts have now been added. If you find the default font hard to read, there are two alternatives to assist with accessibility within the settings menu.

• Added a fancy little shadow below the player

• Updated every UI with new sprites (apart from the cosmetic wardrobe, but more on that later)

• Updated the Main Menu

• Some back-end changes preparing the game to make it easier to create future content

Where next?

The game's development has clearly slowed over this past year. However, the progress has not slowed due to a lack of motivation or enjoyment for the project, so I do intend to keep working on Prison Miner. The game's development has slowed due to University taking up most of my time this past year. I was hoping that I'd have some time over the summer, however, I ended up picking up a freelance project during that time as funds are tight at uni. I am now in my final year of uni, so updates will once again be few and far between for a while. But they will still happen, as I don't believe I can say Prison Miner is in its "final state" yet. Any updates within this next year are likely not going to be content updates with new areas like before. There's a lot about Prison Miner that I feel has been missing from the current content, or old systems that I feel can be improved. This is what will be worked on when I have the availability to do so. Some of the things I'd like to rework in future updates before continuing on to new areas and items are, in no particular order:

Wardrobe Cosmetics

This is why I haven't updated the wardrobe UI (yet), as the planned reworks will change quite a lot of the fundamentals of how the UI is structured. Currently, cosmetics allow for some nice player customisation, which will stay. However, I would also like to use them to allow players to show off their accomplishments via unlockable cosmetics from a variety of sources. Some would be earned from achievements, while others would come from the later-mentioned "Miner Modes". The goal would be to incentivise people to play those modes without requiring them for players who may not enjoy them as much.

Enchants

Currently, with enchants, prestiging a tool isn't worth doing until getting to a point of min-maxing. This isn't something I'm a fan of, so a planned rework is being designed around creating new "Prestige Enchants". These would be enchants only achievable via prestiging a tool, which would be more powerful and unique than the current enchants.

Prestige Enchant Examples

• Swift: Reduce the time before you can swing your pickaxe again by 1 tick (Max level of 5)

• Boost: Boost most other enchants by X% (Prestige enchants excluded)

All numbers are subject to change and are currently untested, so do take those with a grain of salt. There will also be more Prestige Enchantments to come; these are just some examples of possibilities. Another issue with enchantments I've noticed is that there's no real variety in what's "good". It's pretty much just trying to get Mining Spread for every level, which isn't something I'm a fan of, since at that point, why even have the other enchantments? This doesn't mean I plan to remove that enchant, but what I do plan to do about it is add new enchants to create more possibilities for pickaxes with different uses.

New Enchant Examples

• First Strike: Deal +X% mining speed damage to untouched tiles

• Frenzy: Gain +X mining speed per tile broken in a row (with a max of Y tiles)

• Lucky Streak: Gain +X mining fortune per same tile broken in a row (with a max of Y tiles)

• Infectious: X% Chance of mining an ore will spread the ore up to Y nearby tiles

Mine Events

Mines are very bland at the moment. This is probably one of Prison Miner's biggest flaws. Every mine feels the same, and there's almost no reason to return to older mines unless I force new items to require older resources, even if it doesn't make sense for the item and that is not a "fix" I'd like to use as that's more of a band aid slapped on top. What is being planned is temporary events every now and then in two random mines. These events could temporarily increase certain stats, increase skill/tool XP gain, and potentially introduce some other unique events for certain items. This is not the only planned solution to this issue, but it is one of them. I won't go into too much detail on the other solution I have planned, as it isn't as thought out as I'd like it to be yet. However, I'd like to make each mine feel more unique. Whether that be through secret areas, unique mechanics on ores such as hit shields (a potential use for the Swift perk to be really nice here), or content from other areas, such as how the Orvendium mine currently already has the chance for bug spawns.

Mine Mastery

This mechanic is a strong maybe at the moment, since it hasn't been designed out too much yet. However, there is potential for a mechanic where you can "level up" mines by completing challenges within them. This will be designed out more once mines are feeling more unique from each other, as that is a bigger priority. These "levels" would go up to Tier 5 and provide bonuses (or potentially new unlocks) within that mine, such as increased XP from mining there and higher-tier ores that have a higher base XP/drop amount that spawn as a section of the spawned ores.

Miner Modes

I believe this was mentioned a long time ago, but with the potential wardrobe rework for adding unlockable cosmetics, I believe now would be a good time to think about these modes potentially returning as an idea for implementation. These would be separate profiles from your main game, but all unlocked cosmetics would be available in any profile, both current and future. An example of one of these modes would be: Mystic Miner - You only have the lowest tier of tools and armour available to you throughout your entire playthrough. However, enchants would be uncapped, prestige would not reset any enchants, and tool XP would be greatly increased from all sources.

Pickaxe Powers

Pickaxes are very linear right now, and more often than not, there's no reason to use any other pickaxe than the highest tier unlocked, unless you already have one that's got a few nice enchants on it. What I'm thinking of adding is a system to increase a tool's or armour's "Tier" up to a max of 10. The first tier would unlock an ability that is set per pickaxe, which may be active or passive depending on the ability. Tiers 2 through 10 would then just upgrade the efficiency of this ability. Armour would also have something similar. For these, though, I'd have them be set bonuses. The ability would scale from 0→40 instead of 0→10 as it would be 10 tiers total per armour piece. This would also allow players to mix and match sets for multiple abilities, though the armour abilities would all be passive bonuses.

And finally, skills

Skills have been incredibly boring since the beginning of development, to be blunt about it. It was so bad that I even removed the achievements relating to the level-able skills. I don't want to just remove the system, though. I'd like to rework it to make it actually mean something, while still being plausible to max with enough playtime. The first major change for this will be skill breakthroughs. Instead of a linear level from 0→99, there will be breaks every 10 levels. XP will stop being gained after each set of 10 levels, and the player will be presented with a kind of quest/challenge to "break through" and increase the level cap for the next 10 levels. I don't want XP to just be wasted if a player decides to put these quests off, though, so any XP gained whilst at a cap will be placed into an "Overflow Bank" at a slightly reduced rate. When the player is able to increase their level again, this Overflow Bank will be used to increase the rate at which they gain XP until the bank is emptied. Let's say, for example, a player gets to a cap and then earns an extra 100,000 XP in that skill. Around 75,000 of that will go into the "Overflow Bank". The player then completes the breakthrough requirements and is able to level again. If they mine something that would normally give 100 XP, the player would instead receive 200 XP, and the Overflow Bank would reduce to 74,900. Skills will also provide new possibilities, and some things will have skill requirements. Although this hasn't been designed or thought about much yet, so I will not say much about that just yet. If these changes come into play, any skill progress will be reset upon release, so don't go grinding out skills in advance for this possibility (Also wouldn't recommend grinding them currently anyway due to them taking ridiculously long for negligible benefits)