Miner Wars Developer Blog #1

Miner Wars Developer Diary #1 

Monday, May 17, 2010 1:42 PM

WebSite: http://www.minerwars.com/?aid=14

Hi guys,

I just thought it would be cool to share some of the fun and constraints we are having in development of the game and report a bit on how the game is progressing so far.

The team

The team Currently consists of 30 people. There are people from all around the world. Mostly EU and United States. We have around 10 technical people, programmers, admins and QA. The rest is Art - concept art, 2D assets, 3D assets and marketing personnel. We use a lot of viral marketing tools for our job since we do not have the funding to start a full blown campaign. Miner Wars uses a virtual office environment. We all chat on skype and our meetings in voice are held in Team Speak. Rest of the management is done through the use of our internal forums. It is surely a daunting task to manage so many people since until recently we were only 5 :). We are fast learners though so we have already started to cope with it.

Current game development progress

We are heading for the demo release and pre-orders of the game quite soon. Revelation might shed some light on all of that :). All in all you guys can expect something before the summer break, which I think is good news for all of you.

Sectors

We have just recently added the possibility to travel through sectors. Each sector in the game now has a different representation. We have taken decisions on the storyline and its almost ready with just a few adjustments necessary.

Levels inside asteroids and structures

We are bringing you a truly innovative feature with this. Our technology allows for some truly great indoors environments. In addition to the vast area of space you will be able to travel inside asteroids and bases and fight inside them. Think of them as dungeons in space. We believe that we are the first ones to bring such an option to the player. You will be able to seamlessly fly inside an asteroid base, fight inside and gain loot. These places will be for example big factories, hideouts, bases, forgotten temples etc. You will also be able to battle your opponents inside these super-structures.

Factions

The list of factions that will be playable in the game is complete! The two main military factions will be UFSME - United Federation of Space Mining and Exploration and main opposing faction will be IFS - The Independent Space Front. More on factions in the next developers diary. Each week until the demo release we will be unveiling some light on each of the factions. We will also give you a brief look at how the design of each of the faction ships will look. Good news also is that explosions are nearly complete both of big motherships and small ships and let me tell you guys that they really look cool :).

Sounds and music

We have succesfully implemented new sounds to the game and we already have around 10 music scores from our wizard Dan Wentz begin_of_the_skype_highlighting     end_of_the_skype_highlighting. Other team member are also helping him with music. You will love the music we have in the game. Its has a very dark mood and is mostly a fusion of classical music with modern trends. Its just lovable :)

Inter-sector transporation

We have thought long how to make inter-sector transportation both fun and realistic for you guys. We have to say we finally nailed this one down. Here is a snippet from our Game Developement Document:

Big ships with compartment for small ships. The player ship docks with these mammoths and cannot shoot or do anything at the time of transport. You can listen to the faction radio and browse the network for messages and announcments. The compartment doors are closed and you are transported.
These transport physically travel in the sector. They are very fast. It takes them less than 1 minutes to pass one sector. Every team one transport leaves another one enters the sector. They travel in metro intervals - very often.

Publishers

Aditionally we have to say that we have attracted more interest from the publishers out there. I am glad that our game is getting recognition and its mostly because of you guys who are helping the game become what you want it to be.

That is all for this week. Please stay tuned and we hope to bring you soon some more news on our developers diary no. 2. The next one will focus on weapons and ships themselves. We will also give you the basic descrtiption and background on the faction called UFSME.

New Web

We are in preparations to make a new website it will be cooler and badder than the one we are using now. The current website is legacy but somehow we never found enough time to really sit down and prepare a new version. We are still looking for a web-designer who thinks he could handle such a task :) We have some people in the pipe but we are not 100 percent sure yet.

STAY TUNED!!

Tomas "Darghan" Psenicka