Sorry to anyone who downloaded the previous update and got stuck in the tutorial. I ran through it 15 times, but there were a LOT of ways to break it that I never ended up finding. It SHOULD be fixed, and I made a lot of visual tweaks to font sizing and rotation issues.
Star Digger is a fusion of Astroids and Drug Wars, a resource trading, upgrading, space opera, shooting game, like how we used to have back in the good ol 1990s. Theres no pop up ads, and the game is free to download (although I will probably start charging for it once its "done", and the final planets are locked unless you pay me the cost of a soda).
The premise of the game is simple: You play as a space miner shooting astroids, gathering minerals, and bringing them back to your factory ship for refining. Then you decide whether to sell the finished products to buy better mining ships, or use the products directly to upgrade your factory ship to unlock new worlds or a bigger factory & storage.
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For those just tuning in: I have an amateur background in software design and a love for 80s and 90s style gaming, which I feel the iTunes store is sorely lacking. I dont have much background in game design, but since Im having trouble finding games I enjoy playing, I decided to make my own. Im not trying to get rich off my apps, so I dont plan on designing cookie cutter cutesy cartoon squirrel farm games with a wide variety of in-game currency to buy special weapons and gameplay simple enough that a toddler can lick the screen and level up.
My current projects include a Zork-like text game using touch-screen word recognition in place of typing, and an arcade plastic gun shoot-off-the-screen-to-reload tower defense game.
In the last 3 months since I started making apps, a couple coworkers and friends have seen me working and have showed interest in providing voices, sound effects, and graphics work, so I have a lot of updates currently in the works for this game and my upcoming games are going to look a lot sharper and sound a lot better.
If you like Star Digger, please leave comments or unlock the full version (which allows you to get to the last 5 planets). If you dont like it Star Digger, please comment and let me know why. If you want to support an indie game developer, look no further, every purchase is another day of noodles rice and corn to keep me powered writing code.
If any app developers have any questions about how I did XYZ, or ideas or suggestions, please feel free to contact me via the website at slredux.com/digger or post the question on stackoverflow.com
As long as people continue to comment or purchase, Ill keep developing content.
TO-DO LIST:
- Put in enemy ships with basic AI
- Put in friendly ships that you can talk to
- Expand the map from a left-right scroll to either an over-head map that can be smoothly scrolled.
- Update graphics
- I *just* figured out how to do particle effects and explosions! I should have them in by next update.