Early Access on Itch.io went live on Monday and we've already seen 100's of games played, with some even reaching (and in the case of our own in house tester, killing) the boss of World 1. Thank you to everyone who has played and for all the feedback we have received, we will continue to respond to this feedback and release regular patches. The leaderboards are filling up nicely and we are seeing lots of different approaches to the game.

Current Leaderboard at https://miningmybusiness.co.uk

Quirk Cards

    This week saw the introduction of some new clone quirks and some related cards to be found during combat. These cards can only be found when you have the right quirk and offer various abilities and boosts to stats depending on the quirk.

    When a clone is spawned it has a chance to spawn with quirks. Each clone can have a maximum of one positive and one negative quirk. These quirks affect the clone in various ways, for example the positive Lucky quirk grants the clone 10% extra luck in random rolls (eg for card rarities, card spawn rates etc)  whereas the negative quirk Photophobe reduces the headlight range by 50%. You can of course reroll a clone if you don't like the quirks and stats you have rolled but this gets expensive fast, it's often best to just take the clone out for a run than waste ore on several rerolls.

    Of course quirks can be both an advantage and a disadvantage depending on what you get, and this is where the new Quirk Cards come in. These are anytime cards that can appear at level up, from crates or from farming asteroids and ore deposits. Once collected the effects of the card last until the end of the run. Using the two previous examples, Lucky quirk clones can receive what is currently the only "bad" card (more will follow), Unlucky Streak which reduces the luck of the clone by 25%. Photophobic clones can receive Searing Light which causes the headlights to do a small amount of fire damage. 

    As we continue to evolve the game we will be adding more quirks and more Quirk Cards so keep an eye out on the patch notes for more information.

Vampiric familiar Quirk Card for vampiric quirk clones

Quarters and Blueprints

    With players starting to reach the boss, it's time to start working on the new features available to the player once they reach World 2 and also when they reach the 16 challenge milestone. While World 2 itself is  accessible, there are no enemy waves designed for this world yet so the player is currently  given the same enemies from World 1 but with much more hit points and damage, the world is also endless until the proper waves can be added.

    Upon completing 16 challenges you are given access to a new area of the ship, the Officer Quarters. Currently this is very empty with only a terminal for upgrading base clone statistics.

    The next steps in developing this area is to add a build terminal that allows the player to purchase and place various things such as new terminals (e.g. the Multi-kill editor, allowing you to rearrange and change the multi kill effects), new vendors, furniture and decorations. This is something that is being planned right now and you should see changes begin to happen in the coming days.

    Also in the Officers Quarters is a Ship Workshop. This is currently locked and available to open at 40,000 opalite ore. This pricing is both temporary and deliberate to prevent players purchasing something they can't currently use. The workshop will allow you to change the initial loadout of your ship, for example the starter ship as a single slot loadout and it starts with Laser Cannon I in that slot. Therefore when you start a run the ship starts with Laser Cannon I, you could change this to be Plasma Cannon I for instance.

    However the true value in the ship workshop comes from being able to build your own ships. From World 2 onward you will start finding blueprints for various ship parts and weapons. These blueprints come in three parts with you needing to find all three parts to unlock the blueprint piece. Once unlocked these parts can be combined to make new ships with various pros and cons, a fast engine may help with manoeuvrability but reduce your shields strength, a larger hull might improve your hull hit points and give you extra loadout slots but come at the price of speed. Weapon blueprints open up the option of having different weapons, with each ship coming with a number of weapon slots (the first ship has 4 weapon slots, loaded with Laser, Rail, Plasma and Electro cannons).

    Over the next few days and weeks you should start to see blueprints dropping from the World 2 enemies, asteroids and ore deposits. This should give those who have reached this lofty height something to play for while we work on the enemy line up and boss for Santo VII

Onwards!

    It's a short dev log this week as there's really not a lot to say beyond thank you for purchasing the game and playing as much as you all have. Next time I'll go into some more detail about the blueprint system and show how its going to look. Until then, keep on mining!!!