Zap zat tree for ze water.
Tell me Uncle Lolo, how did you get to make Water Miner (c)(r)(tm)?
Well thank you for asking, and I want to clarify that I am probably not your uncle. Here is the story of this illustrious game.
I make games for a living (or at the moment, non-living). Soon I release McDROID. Some of us Indie devs gather in a skype group called Indie Hive Mind. One day I read the stream and read about ludum dare, I never entered anything in there because I am really good at making excuses to procrastinate, but this time I said to myself “be a man and, what-the-heck-why-not-jam”.
Saturday comes, but the weather is nice so I go outside. But on Sunday I decide to doooo eeeet, so I sit in front of my computer and think about stuff I could do with the theme. What comes up first are overly complicated stuff about ant farming and then as the specter of stress looms, I wise up and mind goes to the most bare bone mining game. I tell a friend about it, she wants to play the thing. But I give up anyway, because the weather is just too nice. When I come back home, she insist that I make the game because she wants to dig, and her sister too. So I fire up Unity and grab Terra Vol I was drooling over a few month back, and decide to make the most basic survival mining game ever about water and a laser drill that saps your body water. The chicken legs came later.
(I’ll use titles now, because it makes this thing I write look more professional.)
THE ART
The source art is Unity assets, texture, sky and trees. I just processed the texture to a photoshop filter to make them hexagonal because hexagon. Made a few 3D models in Maya, chicken legs, gems and water drops, tops 30 minutes. The secret sauce is in the lighting.
Don’t be afraid to over saturate this baybi.
Stainglass
And after some body shaking it looks like this:
There are over 2 trillion ceramic tiles in this game.
THE UI
Unity UI sucks ass, OnGUI, NGUI, whateverUI, they’re horrible, so I go with the old MeshText and place textures in a separate camera with its own layer, GUI are a jealous thing. And wam bam, UI done in 30 minutes.
each UI bit has their own logic, it’s easier to manage. This one has animation to expand and contract when the value changes.
THE GAME LOGIC
In an hour I have a thing working and it’s tons of fun. It’s really minimalist because I can’t make classes that are more than 100 lines or I forget, so it’s all a bunch of components sending messages to each other.
The game logic is all inside the camera, even the UI.
I make the landscape in hexagons because I like hexagons, tune the lighting, it’s fun but it’s lacking in groundedness (is that a word?), that’s because there is no sound, so I put on my headset then the magic of Laurent sound effects happen: I record myself doing plop glou glou glou sounds. Oh yes, a note about the H550. Mine died last week, let’s observe a minute of silence.
RIP H550
Logitech discontinued it, if anyone from logitech reads this post, or if anyone reads this post for that matter, please re-open the h550 factory, I really like this headset.
Thank you.
Back to the development. In a previous gamejam called bacon game jam (bacon jam is a thing now) I made a thing called The Hunger which put you in a maze and it was a celebration of peace and dying of hunger and it was beautiful but players complained that they died too much, so I made Water Miner ™ easy.
Hope you like the game, I doubt you find this post very interesting though but thanks for reading 😀
Drill with a laser that saps your body water.
