Hex Planetoid Mining Sim

[SoggyWaffles]

I've started work on another game. One that I actually plan on seeing through this time. It's planned to be a mining/economy sim based on a moon like planetoid.

Heres the basic idea:

the player starts out with the bare minimum of basic gear, a surveyor, a hauler, a base station, a shuttle craft to load their ore into and use to transport to the selling station, and a single outlier (remote mining platform). Each vehicle has set amount of moves it can perform each turn. At the end of each turn the surveyors will scan the hex it occupies and all 6 neighboring hexes for ore, any outlier will unload ore into an adjacent hauler then collect more ore, and of course the max moves of each vehicle will be reset. After 7 turns the shuttle will launch (no stopping it!). It will take 2 turns for the shuttle to reach the selling station, at that point the player will be able to buy the supplies he/she needs to build/expand/whatever. Then the shuttle will take 2 more turns to return to the base station. Of course all this can, and will be tweaked.

There will be multiple ore types, I envision 7 or so, 4 very common ones and 3 very rare ones. Each map will have the 4 common one and 1 maybe 2 of the rare ones. Sell prices will of course represent this. There will be other 'companies' selling ore at the selling station as well. and the 2 days it takes your shuttle to get to market the prices might have changed, so you'll have to keep an eye on what the market is doing and load your shuttle accordingly (there will be a ticker of sorts).

Thats it in a nut shell. I don't have anything too close to what I want out of it yet (school keeping me busy and such), but I wanted to share this project and get some feed back. (yes i know my code is atrocious, thanks )

Controls:
Arrow keys: Scroll around
Left Mouse: Clicky Clicky things
S: toggles display the surveyed ore on and off, off by default
O: toggles display all ore on and off, use for debugging and find ore fast, won't be in for much longer

Units: (as they exist right now)
Surveyors: the long legged spider looking things
Haulers: the other ones

Like I said before, I has much work left, but I'm really looking for feed back. Oh, also if you want to take a crack at some graphics let me know, as you can see mine suck (those are supposed to be craters.. not tree stumps...). Oh, name suggestions? A friend has thrown out SiMine (read Sim Mine), which I like, but can be usurped.

Screen Shot of tease!

[SoggyWaffles]

Seems to be a bit more playable now. Controls are now listed in the upper right hand corner.

Being that this isn't the normal platformer, game play is a little different and not quite intuitive. So heres a quick run down:
You start off with 2 types of units, surveyors and haulers. I think the names pretty well describe their uses. The surveyors can move "fast" 5 hexes per turn. At then end of each turn the surveyor, ummm, surveys the surrounding hexes for ore. To see the ore surveyed, use 's' to toggle it on and off. You can move a hauler, 3 hexes per turn, onto a surveyed hex and unpack it, with 'u', to build a mining platform. At the end of each turn a mining platform will transfer up to 5 ore to a adjacent hauler, and then will mine one unit of ore. Each platform can hold up to 10 ore at any time.

When turning a hauler into a platform the hauler needs to have not moved that turn, when a platform is turned back into to hauler, with 'p' (for pack), it will have no moves left for that turn.

To end each turn, hit space bar.

I guess thats it.

[Robin]

Interesting concept.

I have no idea what to do once I get those haulers in the right place. I tried pressing U and going to the next round, but neither seemed to do anything.

[SoggyWaffles]

Humm... haulers will unpack only if they have not moved during the current turn. Try hit space to start the next turn then hit 'u'. see if that works. I also seem to have to some color issues I didn't notice before. Let me know if that works, my UI is pretty lacking so its kinda hard to tell whats going on.

[Robin]

Hm, didn't seem to work. And I can't tell from the code what's going on either.

[SoggyWaffles]

Its working for me and I downloaded the file I posted just to make sure. Are you trying to unpack a surveyor (the long legged ones)? And yes, my code is terrible.

[SoggyWaffles]

Actually I think I see what's happening. If you click on the unit it will select it, and in that version you need to have the mouse just hover over the unit, not have it selected, to unpack it. So after you start the new turn, don't click on the hauler, and if you do just right-click to deselect anything. I never noticed how weird that was until now. Also, packing up a platform into a hauler will crash it.

/me adds something else to the "fix odd non-intuitive controls" list

[Robin]

Ah, ok. I'd say that's something you need to fix (both the hovering and the crashing)

[SoggyWaffles]

Ok! Fixed the crashing, made selecting units more intuitive, click once to select, then again to move it (or hit 'm', you know for move). A selected unit will now retain a hex around it. While selected you can unpack a hauler and pack up a platform (just not the main one). Also if you liked to see the hexes under the mouse cursor you can hit 'T' to toggle that feature on and off. You can also toggle having all the controls shown with 'C'. Good luck! and break something new! (so I can fix it!)

[Robin]

How can you bring back ore to the main thingy?

Also, it's confusing having to click twice to be able to move. Why can't both unpacking and moving be available after one click?