more content for the ship miner update

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-title:  "Ship Miner Next Steps DRAFT"
+title:  "Ship Miner plan update"
 # date:   2024-01-18 20:00:00 -0300
-excerpt: This blogpost is about the current plan for Ship Miner.
+excerpt: Share about my current time dedication plan for Ship Miner and also what to I am going to focus right now.
 author: Ariel Coppes
 tags:
   - shipminer
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-Until last month I was working half of my time in Cleared Hot (the helicopters game) and almost the other half of my time for a javascript app named +Mercados for a couple of old friends. 
+Until the last month I was working half of my time in [Cleared Hot](https://store.steampowered.com/app/1710820/Cleared_Hot/) (btw wishlist!) and almost the other half of my time for the +Mercados mobile app for a couple of old friends. 
 
-I had really little time to spend on my own projects but now I am slowly recovering it by reducing the time on the app, my idea is to target 75% of my time for Cleared Hot and 25% to myself, and this means spending time on Ship Miner, which btw, had another great tweet/post.
+My plan was to start slowly reducing time on that app and spend it for my projects but in the middle of thinking that, this tweet happened:
 
 <div class="post-image">
     <a href="https://x.com/arielsan/status/1789789080370258069" target="_blank"><img src="/assets/moonminer/shipminer-besttweet-2024_01.png" /></a>
 </div>
 
-It had a lot of positive comments where my main conclusions were that I can feel confident on the art style, and also that the mining core mechanic inspire good things on people, they are imagining games over it that they like. Now I have to see if the game I end up making is the one they wanted and/or they like it anyways, that is the path ahead right now. And this is one of the main reasons I want to work on recovering time for the game.
+It had a lot of positive comments where my main conclusions were that I can feel confident on the art style direction, and also that the mining core mechanic inspire good things on people, they are imagining games over it that they like. Now, I have to see if the game I end up making is the one they wanted, and if not, the like it anyways. And, that is the path ahead right now. 
 
-So, focusing on the plan, I am spending time on Ship Miner and by that I have to continue defining stuff. Right now I have a good core mechanic, it feels super nice to play, I have a great toy but I want to have a game too. 
+But also, it helped me deciding to speed up the plan on recovering dev time. So I am targeting to be spending 25% of my time on Ship Miner 25% on +Mercados in the short term, and then move to 50/50 between Cleared Hot and Ship Miner (100% focused on games development).
 
-The initial core loop in my mind was: mine, survive, improve, repeat. But right now I only have the mine and repeat xD.
+In terms of Ship Miner itself, I have to continue defining stuff. Right now I have a good core mechanic and it feels really good but it just a toy and I want a game over it, and that should be my focus. 
 
-So my next steps are related to complete that core loop, at least a basic version and start playtesting to get some feedback on that. I am also thinking in hiring a game designer friend for advice on this. 
+The initial core loop in my mind was: mine, survive, improve, repeat. But right now I only have the mine (and maybe a bit of the repeat part).
 
-Right now I am working in some ideas for the improvement. 
+So my next steps are related to complete that core loop, at least a basic version and start playtesting to get some feedback on that. I am also thinking in asking a game designer friend for paid consultancy on this topic. 
 
-Initially I wanted the game to be in separated steps, and a bit random, like Nuclear Throne, where you select mutations between levels, so in here you will be gathering minerals and then jump to next asteroid and in the middle you were going to buy random upgrades with your minerals. But the problem I see there is you can't plan at all how to use your minerals, if you didn't have enough minerals for an upgrade you wanted, and then it doesn't appear anymore, it is strange.
+Right now I am working in some ideas for the improvement part of the core loop. 
 
-So now I am changing a bit the idea. One thing I noticed playing the game is that I like to be most of my time mining. So I am changing a bit the approach, maybe you can upgrade at any time, you just have to have the upgrade in your set of upgrades (maybe unlocked in each jump) and you can research it at any time if you have enough minerals. Research is going to take some time, so you have time as resource too, but the good thing is you can continue mining. 
+Initially I wanted the game to be in separated steps, and a bit random, like Nuclear Throne, where you select mutations between levels, so in here you will be gathering minerals and then jump to next asteroid and in the middle you were going to buy random upgrades with your minerals. But the problem I see there is the player can't plan well how to use the gathered minerals. For example, if he doesn't have enough minerals to buy an upgrade, and then it doesn't appear anymore, it is a bit weird.
 
-But how to unlock those upgrades... maybe having to jump to next asteroid could be an option but maybe, to be aligned with the pillar of mining and exploration, the upgrades blueprints can be found by mining like normal minerals, you just mine mine and a new blueprint is found! Maybe you still have to select from some random options but at least it is more integrated with the mining and discovering cycle.
+So now I am changing a bit the idea. One thing I noticed playing the game is that I like to be most of my time mining. So I am changing a bit the approach, maybe the player can improve at any time, just have to have the upgrade unlocked and research if have enough minerals. Research takes some time to complete so you can continue mining. So this would be more like in XCOM or Master of Orion where you have to wait game time to get a research completed.
+
+How to unlock those upgrades? maybe when jumping to next asteroid could be an option. Another one, maybe more aligned with the pillar of mining and exploration is that the upgrades blueprints can be found by mining like other resources (maybe you still have to select from some random options but at least it is more integrated with the mining and discovering cycle). This is a path I want to explore.
 
 <div class="post-image">
     <img src="/assets/moonminer/blueprint-found-ups.gif" />
 </div>
 
-The other thing that happened to me when thinking this was that I want the player to mine and consume minerals, but upgrades sound like a definitive thing and also they should take some time to research (and increase over time if researching a new level of the same upgrade), can't be so fast that it doesn't make sense to use time. So the other thing I thought was to have a way to build consumables, over time too, but can be less time than upgrades and a bit more fixed. What are consumables? can be instant effect stuff like recover health, apply a boost, or something like that, and can also be effects that last some time like building a drone that helps you mine faster, or helps you getting the minerals, etc. But one issue with this is that I need some kind of inventory, so you can build stuff, store it and activate it when you want/need. I like that but also want to keep it as simple as possible (and I have visual limits).
+The other thing that happened to me when thinking this was that I want the player to mine and consume minerals but upgrades sound like a definitive thing and also they should take some time to research (and probably increase time I have multiple levels of the same upgrade) and can't be so fast that it doesn't make sense to have the time resource here. So the other thing I thought was to have a way to build consumables, using time too but can be less than upgrades and probably fixed (not changing over time). Consumables can be instant effect stuff like recover some health, speed up boost, or something like that, and can also be effects that last some time like a drone that helps you mine faster or search for minerals, etc. I want the player to plan which consumables he wants but I also want him to activate it when he wants. So I need some kind of inventory to store consumables. I like that but also want to keep it as simple as possible. So I will try to test it with the less effort on visuals (in terms of UI) and see if I like it and makes sense for the game.
 
-So yeah, that is where am I right now, exploring that part of the loop, the improve part of the loop. As soon as I get some insight of it, I will try to focus on the survive part which will probably be related with enemies appearing from some places and attack you, steal minerals, etc.
+So yeah, that is where am I right now, exploring the improvement part. As soon as I get some insight of it, I will try to focus on the survive part which will probably be related with enemies appearing from some places and attack you, steal minerals, etc.
 
 Thanks for reading.