Miner Wars

[Scott Tortorice]

This sounds very interesting (thanks goes to RPG):

Miner Wars

As a player, you operate an advanced mining ship in an open world asteroid belt area. You dig kilometers of tunnels, harvest the ore, travel the solar system, fight your enemies and discover mysterious alien secrets.


Game play is led by an epic story and is a combination of a single/multi-player game, cooperative, or you against everyone.


The story will introduce you to many types of missions: rescue, exploration, revenge, base defense, theft, transportation, stealth, search and destroy, pure harvesting, racing or just flying around and destroying everything you see.

Hmm...I think this is another example of a game developer coming up with a more interesting story than anything I've seen from Hollywood in a long time! I love the idea of asteroid miners vs. "peace activists"!

[Scott Tortorice]

Update on the release date from the dev:

Hi,

I guess I can tell you more about the release date. I feel that after reading following lines some of you will walk through these known psychological states: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression and Acceptance.

Hehe. That was just fun. Now seriously.

After we announced Miner Wars, we started to receive a lot of good attention. More then I expected. And also a lot of expectations. So I was thinking. Should we finish it in estimated date, that means in a rush and not sure if the game will be super-cool? Or spend more time on development and testing and especially polishing details and make this game as brilliant as possible? I decided for the second.

As this requires more time, we are postponing the release to the middle of 2010.

Yes, that's it. Middle of 2010. Sorry to all impatient

Please look on it from our side: we want to release a game that we can be proud of and luckily we have the money to support longer development, so there isn't reason to rush things. Only that you will have to wait longer.

Meanwhile we will be releasing some new infos, screenshots, etc.

I can wait. I think this game has a lot of potential, so they might as well take the time to do it right!

[kawaiku]

It seems a lot of potentially good games are getting pushed backed for a more polished release! Sounds good

[Scott Tortorice]

An update on Miner Wars is posted out front (I'm much too lazy to repost it here ). Long short: now a late 2010 release and the devs are following the early buy-in model. When it gets closer to release, I might just well give them my money.

[SkaterMcgee]

An update on Miner Wars is posted out front (I'm much too lazy to repost it here ). Long short: now a late 2010 release and the devs are following the early buy-in model. When it gets closer to release, I might just well give them my money.

Youre to lazy? I dont think so.

[Scott Tortorice]

Here's an alpha build of Miner Wars:



Looking good! I can imagine all sorts of interesting battles taking place deep within asteroids!

[Scott Tortorice]

New vid released today, this time of Buster Rockets in action:

Bust Up That Asteroid!

[Dr Zaius]

Will be interesting to see if this pulls in some of the carebears from EVE Online.

[Scott Tortorice]

Just got a press release from Keen. Makes for interesting reading, especially the part about transportation:

I just thought it would be cool to share some of the fun and constraints we are having in development of the game and report a bit on how the game is progressing so far.

The team

The team Currently consists of 30 people. We have around 10 technical people, programmers, admins and QA. The rest is Art - concept art, 2D assets, 3D assets and marketing personnel. We use a lot of viral marketing tools for our job since we do not have the funding to start a full blown campaign. Miner Wars uses a virtual office environment. We all chat on skype and our meetings in voice are held in Team Speak. Rest of the management is done through the use of our internal forums. It is surely a daunting task to manage so many people since until recently we were only 5 . We are fast learners though so we have already started to cope with it.

Current game development progress

We are heading for the demo release and pre-orders of the game quite soon. Revelation might shed some light on all of that . All in all you guys can expect something before the summer break, which I think is good news for all of you.

Sectors

We have just recently added the possibility to travel through sectors. Each sector in the game now has a different representation. We have taken decisions on the storyline and its almost ready with just a few adjustments necessary.

Factions

The list of factions that will be playable in the game is complete! The two main military factions will be UFSME - United Federation of Space Mining and Exploration and main opposing faction will be IFS - The Independent Space Front. More on factions in the next developers diary. Each week until the demo release we will be unveiling some light on each of the factions. We will also give you a brief look at how the design of each of the faction ships will look. Good news also is that explosions are nearly complete both of big motherships and small ships and let me tell you guys that they really look cool .

Sounds and music

We have succesfully implemented new sounds to the game and we already have around 10 music scores from our wizard Dan Wentz. Other team member are also helping him with music. You will love the music we have in the game. Its has a very dark mood and is mostly a fusion of classical music with modern trends. Its just lovable

Inter-sector transportation

We have thought long how to make inter-sector transportation both fun and realistic for you guys. We have to say we finally nailed this one down. Here is a snippet from our Game Development Document:

Big ships with compartment for small ships. The player ship docks with these mammoths and cannot shoot or do anything at the time of transport. You can listen to the faction radio and browse the network for messages and announcements. The compartment doors are closed and you are transported.

These transport physically travel in the sector. They are very fast. It takes them less than 1 minutes to pass one sector. Every team one transport leaves another one enters the sector. They travel in metro intervals - very often.

Publishers

Additionally we have to say that we have attracted more interest from the publishers out there. I am glad that our game is getting recognition and its mostly because of you guys who are helping the game become what you want it to be.

And the latest vid:

[Scott Tortorice]

Another game that has fallen off my radar. But it's now back on!

Last week Miner Wars has been released at a 70% discount in its pre-alpha version. We have allowed our fans to buy the game before its even released and save a lot of money on its purchase. I can already state that the sales have been going spectacular and the sheer number of new registrations proves it.

Glad to see that this isn't becoming vaporware!

STATE OF THE GAME
Currently the game has one functional sector and basic single-player gameplay. We will be adding the multiplayer part of the game quite soon with arenas for competitive game-play. We have also added an editor in which fans of the game will be able to make their own sectors. Very soon, players will be able to share these sectors online with their friends. In the near future we will also add the possibility of sharing these sectors with the entire multi-player community. The final state of the first installment will be the single player campaign with full co-op story and multiplayer arenas with deathmatch and team deathmatch modes.After the release of the first installment we will continue to work on the MMO part of the game which will contain all the advertised features along with a few surprises! We are not ready to disclose the final release date yet as we need as much feedback from the community as possible.

...

We believe that with our ever-growing community we can keep our heads high and bring principle production to a successful close some time next year.The community has continued to grow by leaps and bounds: we currently have something over 70 000 fans returning to the website regularly, and 250 000 unique visits on the website.