Hello there.
Since early January, I'm slowly working on a game inspired by Motherload (game page). The core aspect of the original game was to dig further and further, digging stuff to sell in exchange of money for fuel and upgrades until you hit rock bottom. A classic improve and retry kind of game that was (IMHO) one of the flagship genre of Flash games of this era (Hedgehog Launch, anyone?).
So I started by having at least a similar working gameplay loop with fuel, upgrades and a basic world gen, making up sprites and SFXes* when needed. And here is how it looks:
*Or borrowing samples out of OpenGameArt or FreeSounds and reworking them, this is also another good way to exercise my SFX design skills.
To be fair, I didn't play the original game a lot, only a little. The idea of making a game like Motherload comes from a friend who loved the game, so this is mostly as far as I know about the original game barring a spoiler. I wonder how much I'll overlap its features and how much I'll hopefully) make it original.
(For the curious ones, the font used here is MaruMonica (link).)
Regarding the future, I intend to explore my options in terms of gameplay expansion (objects, upgrades, etc...). As I'm not a game designer, I'm still struggling to find ideas I could work out well or even the balancing itself, but I'll take my time, one task at a time.
For now, I'm working on polishing a little bit the current state of the game before releasing something like a proof-of-concept or a micro-demo showing the base gameplay loop, I only need to fix a few limitations and add some SFX where they're lacking.
If you dig deep enough, you'll see more valuable ore depots in the stone, harder to dig, but thankfull there are upgrades to help with.
I have no fixed goals yet, so this project will lives on moving forward at a slow yet steady place, I'll see where it'll go (or when I'll get bored/burnt out of it).
