Major Miner | Patreon Weekly #210

Hey Patrons, in this weekly I’m going to be going over more specific early design details for the blacksmith quest rework!

There also a new Patreon Poll this week! I strongly suggest that you read this weekly before reading the poll though, as they go hand in hand. The poll will let me gauge interest in some of the specific environment ideas I currently have.

The Pickaxe

As mentioned last weekly, I am refocusing my design for the blacksmith quest to be more rooted in existing game mechanics. Each variant of the quest will put the player into a different sub-area and task them with evading hazards and collecting rare minerals.

The big unique mechanic for these environments will be the ability to tunnel through walls with the blacksmith’s pickaxe. I’m currently planning to give this some form of usage limit, to prevent the player from just digging through every wall they see. The pickaxe might break after a certain number of uses, or might start to wear down, taking increasingly longer amounts of time to dig through walls. I like the second idea here as it gates exploration via mining with hunger, which is already used to gate exploration via searching.

With the above in mind though, the obvious next question is what are the environments going to be?

Terrain and Hazards

Obviously just mining in an empty cave isn’t very fun, so there have to be some gameplay elements that give the player a reason to mine. I want to try and think of a bunch of unique environment features that work around this mechanic, presenting something that’s still rooted in Shattered gameplay but feels fresh compared to the rest of the dungeon where walls are immovable.

To illustrate how mining changes things, consider a trap placed directly in a hallway. This is something that players often find frustrating in Shattered, and I’ve even put in game logic to reduce cases of this happening for traps that don’t expire. In this quest area though, something like this could be a regular terrain feature, as the player can always create their own path if the existing one isn’t safe.

I also want to try and structure levels themselves around the mining ability as well. If the player can break through walls, level structures can be a lot more free-form, and there can even be little hidden nooks that are only accessible via mining. Although I do want to be careful to have the right balance of randomness and structure in these environments. Too consistent and repeating the quest gets boring, too random and trying to find everything becomes frustrating.

As I mention above, please take a look at this week’s Patreon Poll for some more specific environment concepts! Even if you don’t want to vote, you’ll likely find the read quite interesting.