News Years Resolution: Much More Patron Posts (Kinda Long)

Hey you awesome, currently TEN, patrons of Dogeminer! Your support means the world to me, thank you all! Hopefully we'll be a lot more soon, I imagine putting more in-detail posts up here would be a good place to start, if any! I'm not good with schedules so I'll try without first, otherwise I'll switch to something like one post a week, or twice a month, or .... you know, trial and error!

I would write a lot more here and on the blog but I am focusing my time and energy I have available into development (it's been a stressful last quarter here and I feel like my daily energy is at an all-time low this year, so developments been a bit sluggish but the ideas are still flowing).

We've grown a lot in 2019 - especially on Discord. The Patreon page didn't even exist, and the Steam release wasn't as set in stone to happen and ohh, all the new people I've gotten to know! Amazing! It's truly breathtaking to me. Maybe Keanu too. And it all started as a fun weekend project to make a "dogecoin simulator" for the /r/dogecoin subreddit back in 2014! (The absolute first versions). I've learned a ton since, I can recommend making a game if you want to learn how to code. Start simple though!

(Fun fact: Dogeminer 2 was confirmed to be an accurate depiction of how dogecoin is mined by devs on reddit! Everything just feels so wholesome with dogecoin for some reason... :D)

The community is getting bigger every day and it's real fun to see, big thanks to our great mods, who do more for the Discord than I do, really! And since ChateauLafite1827 (or just LaFite on the discord) is one the absolute kindest most shibe-like graphic artists in the world, we're even getting some nicer art for the game! #blessed

Expect a few things to become replaced with shinier versions along the way thanks to LaFite, plus a higher quality in general for new stuff (not everything - I can't afford to pay anyone to work for me, except edge cases, so I never ask too much (I hope). Luckily, people offer their help for the good of the game! Kind of just like you, reading this, have done!<3)

Btw, I think the time & energy thing is one of the reasons I haven't even posted about the latest Holiday patch or other small fixes yet - neither on the blog nor here! Shall we start?

First I'll write a bit about the holiday update (first holiday thing in Dogeminer, it's small right now but can grow, grow, grow! Also this time I coded it to be relatively easy to add new holidays and assets related to it.

If I go through all my git commits and view what I've done up until this patch I'll find all the small things that've changed, but that will take away too much energy from the stuff I want to work on today, which I will tell you about soon, but first, what's the holiday theme right now?

Basically, it's just two things at the moment:

• Snow-Santa Theme (snow on rocks, planets and some buttons - credit to LaFite for both the snow and the hats! - Yes, we want hats to be a thing too, but right now these are complete sprites, meaning the hat isn't removable yet. We'll find a way...)
• A little bit of Xmas-themed loot (Candy canes and an Xmas tree as pickaxes, a few fortunes including the legendary Shobbe as a Santa (although not named shobbe ingame, nor is the fortune legendary lol))

Later this month I'll add more loot, probably some higher tier loot and maybe a few low tier. It's the least I can do with the current timetable.

There's also a few cool ideas floating around relating to the theme. They require a bit of coding, we'll see if they make the draft for this years holiday. Though probably not, since I'd prefer to work on stuff that needs to get done before I can dive deep into Steam, and I haven't even gotten my RL Xmas sorted yet.

Right now I'd love to get to work on the new Mystery Box feature! I'll tell you about the basics of it real quick!

The Mystery Box is currently a fortune, that looks like this (I don't know if this is how you upload pics to patreon mid-post):

https://www.patreon.com/file?h=32188583&i=4821849

It's currently just a fortune, but it will soon become openable for extra rewards (loot!) with a timer. The catch is that you need to have adblock disabled in order to grab the actual reward. This part is needed because of the increasing amount of adblock users (reaching around 50% sometimes) worldwide, at least until we can get to Steam. If I had a way to give patrons a pass on this requirement, I'd love to add that (let me know if you know of one that does not require a server, just static files). Also, every X time you open it you'll get bonus rewards!

Okay, that's the feature right now, it might change in the future or it might not, depends on what the players think about it. I'll get to work now. Talk soon. Bye bye now.

//rkn