Star Tech: Deep Space Mine by Honest Dan
A puzzle-builder, where you build up a multi-ring mining rig around a highly valuable dark crystal to harvest its power and precious minerals.
The game isn't super intuitive, so we highly recommend this < 2 minute explanation to help you enjoy the game. https://youtu.be/aWmnVS27LjM
How to play
Buildings and Workers
Place buildings and workers on your mining rig. - POWER (Red) Buildings: harvest power from the crystal. - PRODUCTION (Blue) Buildings: harvest precious gems from the crystal. - POPULATION (Green) Buildings: provides population for your mining rig. - SPECIAL (Grey) Buildings: unlockable buildings that provide special bonuses. - WORKER (White) Cards: harvest additional resources from buildings.
Resources
Resources are needed to fuel the mining rig and build new buildings. - If your POWER (Red) reaches 0, it's game over. - GEMS (Blue) are used to unlock new buildings and upgrade your rig. - POPULATION (Green) allows you to play worker cards.
Chaining
- Place buildings ADJACENT to each other for them to harvest the crystal's resources or gain population.
- Bonus resources are awarded for longer chains of buildings.
- Be aware of WALLS that are on the edges of some buildings, as they will block chaining.
- Workers can harvest resources from buildings, regardless of if the buildings are chained.
The Mining Rig
- The RINGS of the mining rig rotate periodically, track their next rotation on the UI top left.
- The CRYSTAL grows unstable, and shoots out FLARES periodically which will destroy tiles.
- Earn enough GEMS to unlock new buildings and additional rings for the mining rig.
[Lightning Rods protect tiles from getting destroyed by periodic Crystal Flares]
[Earn new cards and expand your rig as you hit your production target]
[...and don't run out of power!]
Full-Description
Using Star Tech’s patented Deep Space Mining technology, a series of interlocking rings are constructed to form the mining rig around Cosmic Crystals. By constructing structures on the various rings of the mining rig, power and precious materials can be harvested from the highly valuable Crystals.
To harvest the Crystal, harvesting structures have to be built in clusters on the rig. The larger the chain of structures, the more resources those structures can harvest. Additionally, specialist workers can be employed to manually harvest materials from structures, useful for harvesting resources from isolated, non-clustered structures. Harvesting precious minerals allows the mining rig to be extended with additional rings.
However, maintaining chains of structures is an on-going challenge. The rings of the mining rig rotate periodically, altering the layout of the mining rig. Structures need replacing periodically, and buildings cost a variety of resources.
Critical Bug Fixes:
- Updated Unreal Engine pre-requisites to be included in the build
- Fixed attachment issue (relative instead of world) that misaligned the rings when you get new rings if you had rotated the camera using the mouse wheel
- Fixed text on card tooltip that wasn't displaying correctly due to font
- Fixed Options menu in game, as was previously soft-locking the game
| Link | https://honestdan.itch.io/star-tech-deep-space-mine |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/52/star-tech-deep-space-mine |
Ratings
| Overall | 56th | 4.096⭐ | 28🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 92th | 3.942⭐ | 28🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 16th | 4.25⭐ | 28🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 71th | 4.269⭐ | 28🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 126th | 4.231⭐ | 28🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 47th | 4.077⭐ | 28🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 313th | 3.146⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 104th | 4⭐ | 28🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 18🗳️ | 32🗨️ |
It took me a while to figure out the mechanics, since there are a lot of symbols and resources to keep track of and not everything is super obvious (the three cubes for duration/charges took me a while to get). Once you understand all the resources and how walls work, the game is quite fun.
I particularly liked the card design, the way it played with geometry, and the rotating ring structure that got bigger as you played. The walls were really neat, but it would have been cool to see even funkier combinations of edges (like a tower that is really good, but has three of four sides closed). Workers were a nice design decision to help the player get rid of outlying structures.
I did notice it was *very* easy to misclick. As your ring gets bigger, it eventually is behind your hand. I kept forgetting the cards were drag-and-drop, clicking one, and having it immediately place on the edge of the ring. (I also noticed it was possible to hold onto a card during a reshuffle, but don't really know how I got it to happen. That's probably some kind of speedrun tech though.)
Audio is really nice, the music reminded me a little bit of Risk of Rain 2 (probably just because that's the most recent space-ish game I've played). Lots of little polish in the UI like the button feedback when hovering over a card.
Great work, looking forward to seeing what you guys make next time!
@jeremy-ryan really appreciate the valuable feedback! Thanks for checking out the game and giving it the time to understand it. Yeah, there is a lot of detail that we just packed into tooltips rather than explained properly to the played haha! We actually did have more funky wall combos to begin, but decided to do just none, sides or top and bottom in the end. The reason: it became very confusing when placing tiles on bottom half of wheel, as it was upside down, so the wall ended up being the opposite side to what was intuitive!
Thanks for making this, and good luck during the rest of play and rate!
I had to take some time to figure out the mechanics, but once I got it it became pretty a enjoyable experience, kinda of relaxing even.
I'm really glad you didn't put a time limit on each turn so I can take as much time as I need to think about the consequences. I also loved that you put the option to re-roll the hand at the cost of 1 power, that's pretty neat.
Congratulations on yet another awesome submission, thanks for the game.
Not quite sure what the workers do for me, do they just count as a building for adjacency but not produce their own resource?
Nice and relaxing game. Great work, guys. I did manage to break it though. I think I clicked on a destroyed tile and the tooltip never went away.
So workers don't cost any power. So if you need to be careful with power resource, then you can use workers. They aren't as good as a chain of buildings though, no. and they don't contribute to chains. So yes, not the best! they only last on the board 3 turns, so nice thing with them is you don't need to worry about them clogging up space on the board (like solo buildings do).
Def learned its hard to get balance right in a game like this, without writing code to deal specific cards to the player.
Overall a very satisfying game when it clicks right, I played the downloadable executable and the game was running super fine and has good looking graphics! great job from you two!
You played it fast too I guess. Speedrunning habits.
Thanks a lot for the kind words <3
Also I really liked the little intro logo+kissy sound :D
The sfx was reeally soft for some reason, and I wish there was some BGM (maybe there was but it was also soft???) also (In-game volume was up to max and my computer was at 50). I might try to score higher still, but for now, this was the best I could do xD.
The only other thing (and this is a nitpick) was that I really wanted to look at the stuff at the top of the wheel just to see it closer but I don't think(?) there was a just "look" mode? Anyway, that's a nitpick more than anything else.
The gameplay is quite hard to handle, but once I had understood how things connect, my experience was better. Clean graphics/art, nice background music, the level of polish if quite high.
Can't wait to play your next game ! :)