Some Thoughts About Mines In-game

So I'd like to talk about mines, please note that these are just ideas - not something to take as fact - it might be introduced one day... it might also not, but if it is, it will definitely be for the Steam version+ and not earlier.

So, mines, not the blow-stuff-up kind, but the kind you explore and maybe find some stuff in.

I've been trying to think about ways to make them happen every now and then for more than a year (even sketched a few different ideas on paper, or tried them in Photoshop). Mainly how to spawn them, show them (where? yeah, my first thought was also somewhere on the left side, where the helpers you have are, but this introduces visibility issues and both feels and looks weird when I've done tests), explore them and get stuff from them. I think I have an idea of how to do it now, without messing up the general user experience. I'm not 100 on this and I'd love to hear your thoughts on it, if you have anything in mind.

So I was thinking this: have an icon, like the current inventory and mystery box works, but also with a digit display for how many mines are 'up'. This list would have maybe 6-8 mines and refresh with new mines every 6-8 hours or so, they'd be of different qualities and you'd have to be very lucky to even see a legendary mine spawn. This quality-level could easily be shown just by the color of the mines' name. Maybe it'll also show possible contents of said mine.

Note: I have not thought much about how the actual exploring takes place, just some. This post is mostly about how to actually get to that point. I don't need 100 ideas on this; but if you believe you have the best one, feel free to make a suggestion!

Anyway, at first, I was thinking this exploration is manual per selected mine, short but effective and more valuable than staying back and ignoring them, at least in the beginning for the lower quality levels, maybe you'll only do blue and up at some point even.

But also, later in the game, I was thinking you could unlock or buy an upgrade to the mines that can let some of your helpers auto-explore the mines you select (taking x minutes per mine). Even later, this could also be upgraded to become instant, maybe.

Other thoughts on this are:

Mines are independent of your location, to avoid location hopping just for mines; that feels like it'd be a poor implementation.

If your "current max location" is a space-related place like The Moon or Mars, then some mines found could be asteroids. Maybe there's even a small chance of getting one of the moons up-to-and-around your "current max location" (unless that moon is one of the locations looks at Titan).

These were just some thoughts I had the other day (it's easy to think of what you're not working on!) that I thought would be fun to share with you awesome guys and gals. I didn't do a proper read-through of this post, so I reserve the right to any errors lol.

By the way, if you're not in the loop, in just a few days, April of 2020 will be starting! That means the launch of our 2nd ever holiday "event" in Dogeminer! The Easter in-game holiday will run for the entirety of April (with a 'possibly delayed for one week due to pandemic(s) - but really due to something gone wrong and lots of fixing and testing required'-reservation). It has a bunch of holiday-only fortunes and pickaxes added, an obvious Easter theme all-over, plus a little Easter egg-hunt that we had the time to make (I hope).

Maybe there's something for April Fools too, but to tell you the truth, I haven't coded anything for that and it's day 1, don't expect to be fooled much! (my first idea of making everything do 1 DPS was not a good thing, or so they tell me)

That's it for this post. Thank you for taking the time to read my ramblings, thank you even more for patronage <3

//rkn