Moon Mine
About
In Moon Mine, you play as the site manager of a startup mining operation on the moon. A new, super-valuable resource known as quotanium has been discovered far below its surface. Your goal is to extract a sizeable portion of this resource, while competing against two other startups with their sights set on the same goal.
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Each turn, players allocate their workers to specific levels of the mine, deciding how many workers should mine each resource. They may also adjust the risk factor of these levels: Higher risks will return more resources but will increase the likelihood of workers being poached by other players.
Prototype release
17 Jun 2024
Studio
N/A
Team Size
Solo
Project Timeline
1 May to 17 Jun, 2024 | 1.5 months
Personal Contributions
All art, design, documentation and programming
Development Tools
Unity, Photoshop, Google Docs
Platforms
Windows
Summary of Development
Client Brief & Premise
The requirement of the brief was to develop a competitive multiplayer turn-based strategy game involving bases.
In my initial concept, multiple players would co-operatively control separate departments on a spaceship, being the Bridge, Reactor and Weaponry. This concept would have required the development of intelligent AI-controlled enemies, which would have made the game too complex to develop within the one-month development timeframe - and thus the concept was changed and the scope size reduced.
The concept was iterated to the current one: Three players compete against one another to be the first to mine a certain amount of a hard-to-obtain resource, while Managing two opposing parameters: Productivity and Safety. Low productivity causes one to fall behind in the economic arms-race, low safety allows the competition to acquire your workforce.​​
Economic system
Artwork intended to represent Minerals (left) and Rare-exos (right) as an icon in the UI, scrapped due to them being inconsistent with the rest of the UI.
There are three minable resources, one unique to each level:
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Level 1: Minerals: Used to acquire tier 1 & 2 workers and unlock the second level
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Level 2: Rare-Exos: Used to acquire tier 2 workers and unlock the third level
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Level 3: Quotanium: The player wins by collecting enough of this resource
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Additionally, the player must maintain their Safety Rating which, if it falls too far behind that of the other mines', enables other players to acquire a portion of an opposing workforce.​​​
Interface
The interface provides the player with all the infromation they need on the one page - with each separate statistic partitioned into its own tab. The UI design maximizes the information availble to the player while eliminating the need to navigate between multiple pages to access it.
