dmazin / asteroid-tycoon

We at Asteroid Tycoon pride ourselves on our efficiency and productivity, so GET TO WORK!

Hello! My name is Dmitry.

I was born in St. Petersburg, Russia. I moved to the US in 2000. I now live in London, UK.

I am interested in the history of computing, history of networking, forums, and, especially, text entry systems.

Professionally, I babysit infra. For my last gig, I lead the platform team at Rollbar.

You can check out my personal site and Mastodon.

I've contributed to open source a bit: urllib3, Rust docs, GitHub CLI.

In 2021 @shaoster and I helped quite a few people get vaccinated.

Previously, @dguilak and I started ughMoney. "We track your spending, and send you the bad news." The logo was a sad coin. It was great.

In 2017, I wrote for Mondo 2000 about the effects spell checkers and autocorrect are having on English

asteroid-tycoon's Issues

more transparent stats

I think it would be useful for the player to see what the upgrades are before purchasing them. This would also help make it more clear visually how the bots differ from each other and what their strengths are.

improved death messages

As someone commented on the LD page, it doesn't make sense for all the bots to have a died in vain message since some of them aren't meant to be collectors at all. For example the Vulture could say "$$ in recovered parts" and the Goat could say "## tiles cleared" or something along those lines.

These pop up texts often show up and disappear so fast that it's hard to read them once you have multiple bots out at once. I think to make the texts useful even when you can't see them it would be nice to maybe color code them to indicate the ROI (return on investment) from the bot. So for Bears/Ants/Vultures/Badgers, if it earned more money than it cost to make the text could be green, and if it didn't it could be red. Goats could maybe be labeled good/bad depending on how many rocks cleared vs. harvestable resources destroyed. Squirrels, maybe new tiles revealed?

I think this change would give the players better feedback about the choices they are making and would then justify tuning the game to be harder so that their choices become more important. Right now it's pretty hard to lose the game at all.

bot pathing

So I played again yesterday and noticed that even when a whole lot of the board is cleared, if you tell a robot to go to a tile that it can't break through it immediately gives up and performs it's default at the very top of this screen. I know this is a known thing and that a better AI pathing (getting to the next closest already cleared tile at least?) might be difficult. But if that can't be done then I think it's important to make it clear to the player somehow why the bots are seeming to disobey.

Adding a "clearer tutorial" issue in 3... 2... 1...

music/sfx

Sprucing them up. Maybe limit the current music to being an opening theme and then making a more subtle one that will be more tolerable for the extended gameplay duration.

Making sure each kind of bot has it's own sfx that also won't get too annoying.

Making Artifacts Important

I've been thinking recently about changing the progression requirements from being depth related to requiring the collection of enough artifacts. I think this helps bring them more into the gameplay and gives them a direct value (right now it's pretty unclear that they award random amounts of money). And the story will be more cohesive since we will know that alien tech => bot upgrades which will fit in well with the storyline of corporate's govt contract and weapons deal etc.

This change of course will have ripple effects on balancing, both determining appropriate artifact costs per upgrade as well as artifact placement.

I think that this would increase their value greatly and I think it would be nice to adjust their placement so that some of them are perhaps surrounded by whatever the highest level rock is on that asteroid. This would force the player to make a conscious choice about digging like normal, or having to throw more bots at the tough rock to get to the artifact.

Handling Emails

Two related problems - some people don't bother reading them & they get closed super fast during normal gameplay - both resulting in the player not getting the key gameplay information that they were designed to convey.

I think that there are many different ways to handle the issue. The quickest fix is probably to require players to click a "close" button before the email disappears. That solves the second case, but for me it's still very problematic for people to skip the walls of text completely, thinking they are just for flavor and don't have useful information in them.

I also don't want to just cut out all of the fun "corporate hates you and turns out to be evil" text. The people that bother to read it have also given positive feedback about it.

So, I have a few ideas/questions:

• Can we bold/color or otherwise make more popping the key gameplay relevant info in the emails so that people know to at least skim those parts first?
• And/or can we have a sidebar-type text thing? So that it's always up on the side and you can always scroll back and read all the old stuff without it being up and blocking the whole screen? I'm imagining something like an IM window with PMs from corporate. This would also allow more fun comments from corporate to pop up in a more spread out fashion without being so disruptive.
• And/or a separate intro screen that introduces the main story/gameplay in shorter bursts of text? The entry Planet Corp has a nice format: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=33058

Other ideas?

Vultures get stuck

If two vultures try to suck up the same corpse, one of them gets stuck.

Steps to reproduce:

• kill some robots
• summon two vultures to the same area
• wait for one to get stuck

I think it's a problem with the loop that decides whether a vulture is currently salvaging anything. Perhaps we could just fix this by making the vultures' pathfinding more intelligent at avoiding other vultures? This would make using multiple vultures simultaneously much easier.

Interesting, I was watching somebody else play the game and this bug came up repeatedly—but the player didn't notice until I pointed it out!

Anyhow, I figure fixing this is a good step towards polishing the game up a bit post-LD.

clear tutorial

In order to more explicitly tell the player how to give the bots commands that they will actually obey.