This week has been very busy preparing for the Early Access release here on itch.io on Monday. One of the core missing elements was the online stats web pages which is now working. Every time you start a new save the game will request an online Id which is attached to that game, you can use this to lookup your online stats and view various leader boards. But that's not what this dev log is about.

Online stats webpage

 Instead we are going to take a look at the cannon and projectile weapons systems, these are the weapons you work to upgrade as you complete runs and spend ore at the mothership and provide almost all the damage you will be doing to enemies. 

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Cannons

    Cannons are your primary weapons, they are what you shoot using mouse or right thumb stick. Like all weapons in Mining My Business they have infinite ammunition. All cannons have damage (self explanatory) and cooldown (increases rate of fire) upgrades and your starting card deck comes with level 2 in both for all weapons. Upgrading cannon level, damage or cooldown will give you access to those levels for all cannon weapons on your ship during gameplay. There are also special upgrades for each weapon that have to be bought individually.

    The ship you begin the game with has access to four cannons, Laser, Electro, Plasma and Rail. Each cannon has its own unique style and various pros and cons, such as ease of use, area of effects if any, effectiveness for mining, and so on.

Laser Cannon

    This is the weapon your ship starts with and is a pretty typical space laser. At level 1 it fires a single shot, but with level upgrades you can increase that to up to 8 shots currently. It fires at a fairly fast rate so is good for combat and mining but it lacks any area effect, relying instead on increased shot count to increase the arc of fire. The current special upgrade allows you to reflect laser shots of the scenery.

Electro Cannon

    This area of effect weapon consists of two explosives connected by an electric tether.  Enemies crossing the tether receive decent damage making this a good area of effect weapon for lines of enemies.  The weapon has a short range which can be upgraded with level and is destroyed if either explosive is detonated. The explosives are relatively low damage but can be used effectively in combat with practice. The current special upgrade for the electro cannon causes enemies hit by the electric tether to give of further electrical discharges, adding to the area of effect.

Plasma Cannon

    This plasma cannon is similar to the laser in that it is relatively quick firing.  It fires a small arc of plasma which fades out when it hits an enemy, the fading arc can still hit other enemies but is slowed heavily and only last a short while. This makes the plasma effective for small numbers of closely positioned enemies, particularly as upgrading the weapon level adds further arcs of increasing size. While not a pure area of effect weapon it can still do well against tightly packed groups  The current special upgrade for the plasma cannon causes enemies hit by it to give of plasma discharge, much like the electro cannon upgrade.

Rail Cannon

    This rail cannon is a very slow firing but incredibly high damage beam that will pass through all enemies it hits and reflect once of scenery. It can be difficult to master, especially in early game when you lack the cooldown upgrades, as this makes getting multikills difficult (and the first multikill bonus is cooldown which is great for all weapons). However its high damage and ability to pass through enemies makes it powerful in the right hands. You can increase its range with level upgrades and the current special upgrade increases the number of times the beam will reflect of scenery.

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Projectiles

    Projectiles are your secondary weapons and have a chance to fire when you shoot, adjusted for slow fire rate weapons such as rail cannon to ensure the chance over time remains relatively equal. You can purchase upgrades to increase the chance to shoot and increase the damage of the projectiles.

    You do not start a run with projectiles equipped you have to enable it through levelling up . Your deck also starts level 1 projectiles only, with no additional upgrades, so you will have to purchase upgrades from the shops.  Currently we have two projectiles rockets and plasmarangs.

Rockets

    The rockets are much what you'd expect, flying in the direction of fire and exploding on contact with enemies or scenery. When its level is upgraded you can add additional rockets or homing capabilities. The rocket has good splash damage which makes it suitable for strong area of effect damage. Rockets can damage both asteroids and ore deposits

Plasmarangs

    The plasmarang is a plasma arc that fires out from the ship a short distance and then returns in a straight line. The plasma passes through enemies and is relatively low damage, although it deals a lot of small damage ticks as it passes through. This makes it a great weapon for concentrated lines of enemies and also a very good asteroid mining tool, it cannot however farm ore deposits.

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Anytime Cards

    While your cannons and projectiles account for the majority of your damage, some of the most fun and useful weapon abilities come from "anytime cards". These are the cards that can be found in crates and ore deposits and for the most part can be awarded multiple times.

An anytime card in the wild!

Critical Damage Cards

    You start each run with a 5% base chance to hit enemies for between 5% and 25% additional critical damage. There are two anytime cards types that affect this. The Crit Buff card increases the chance to get a critical hit, and the Lucky Crit card increases the damage range. These cards come in two rarities with the more rare card providing higher increases.

Crit Buff card

Unique Weapon Cards

    Unique weapons give the player either a 15 or 90 second effect , with the shorter 15s timed weapons being a constantly firing effect while the longer 90s weapons are chance based and fire at random intervals within a time range (e.g. between 8 and 15 seconds). Currently there are 6 unique weapons with much much more planned in the coming weeks.

The overdrive weapon 

Specialization Cards

       Each clone has an assigned vocation based on the stats they get when spawned. One of these specialisations is munitions engineer, granted to clones who have a higher Weapons Tech stat than  Piloting, Engineering or Mining. Each of these vocations can receive two unique cards, specialisation and specialisation+. For munitions engineers they receive Weapons Specialization which depending on the cannon being used grants different effects that boost the weapon and make it stronger. At the moment these specializations grant the current cannons rear and/or side fire, it's likely future weapons may have different effects.

Rail cannon specialization+

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The Future

    The weapons we have currently in game is only a small portion of what we expect to add as we progress through creating world 2 and beyond. The idea was always to get a small but fun subset of things working as quickly as possible so that we could work on making the game fun to play first and work with community feedback through the early access to implement more content as we build the final game.

    Here is an idea of what to expect in the coming weeks with regards to weapons and combat:

• Many more Unique weapons, the intent is to add these to the anytime card deck as frequently as we can manage, we'd like to have 20+ different weapons eventually, but the more we can manage the better.  We have a list of weapons we want to implement and will also be watching feedback for even more ideas.
• World 2 will introduce blueprints. These are farmed in asteroids and ore deposits and have a chance of dropping (although much less) in the same way anytime cards do. These blueprints come in sets and once you complete a set you get access to new ships and new weapons. You can unlock the ship workshop to build a new ship out of these blueprints.
• Synergy cards. We haven't had time to implement this yet but the basic idea is that certain combinations of ship upgrades, weapons and other stats such as vocation or quirks will give a chance for new rarer cards to appear. These cards can include unique weapons.
• The intent with World 1 was to create a gentle introduction to the game loop with enough challenge for it to be rewarding to play, and balanced to provide a decent progression to the first boss. World 2 will be trickier, it will introduce new smarter enemy types with brutal spawn rates requiring good upgrades to progress further.

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Early Access

    Monday will finally see the game released to the public, something we've been excited about and terrified of in equal measures. We hope you enjoy the game and can see the potential it has. Bear in mind that the game is still in development, things are and will be broken and while we'll do our best to prevent it, patches may break saves. We will work as fast as possible to address game breaking bugs and release new content with World 2 content being rolled out over the coming weeks.

    We have decided on a price point of $2.99 for the itch.io release with a 50% discount applied during the month of December to bring the price to $1.49. Everyone who purchases the game will receive a steam key once the game goes to early access there. Downloading the game on itch.io will give you access to a Windows and Linux version and automatic updates. Steam deck users will have to manually add the game to Steam via desktop mode (until the game is released on Steam).

    Well that's it for now. I'm going to go back to tweaking the website ready for monday's release and I hope to see you miners on the leaderboards soon!