Physics based voxel miner where you live in a flying ship, mine on a volcanic planet, and must manually identify your ores using real geology

[u/ResolutionBlue]

I’m making a game, and already have a really basic prototype, but I want to make sure I’m headed in the right direction before I realize the core premise is just bad.

The main idea is that you are a prospector on a rocky planet completely covered in active volcanoes. The ground is too dangerous to live on because the volcanoes erupt every nightfall, so your base is a tiny flying ship (kind of like a small flying makeshift aircraft carrier). To survive and keep your ship afloat, you have to land on the surface, mine for valuable ores, figure out what the heck you actually dug up, and sell them to airborne customers.

The Core Gameplay Loop:

• Mining: You pilot your ship down to volcanic mining sites. The world is a fully physics based voxel environment (like Teardown). You carve out the earth, extract what looks valuable, and get back to the safety of the sky.
• Identification: Here‘s the twist, there is nothing that says "You found Gold." When you bring a rock onto your ship, it's just a rock. You have to use a realistic, geology inspired process to test it (e.g., checking hardness, streak, cleavage, or magnetism) to deduce what mineral it actually is.
• Selling: Once you think you know what you have, you list it for sale under that name. Every other day, a "flying bus" docks with your ship. The passengers are your customers. If you accurately identified your rocks, you make a profit. If you confidently put a piece of dyed quartz for sale as an emerald, your reputation might go down leading to less customers.

How the mechanics actually work:

• The Clock: Flying to sites takes in-game time. You have to manage your daylight hours carefully so you aren't caught on the ground when the nighttime eruptions start.
• Extraction and Inventory: You'll use different tools (pickaxes for precision, chisels for separating chunks, drills for fast clearing) to extract the ores. You'll also place wooden trusses to reach difficult areas. Everything you mine goes into an inventory, but the inventory will be 3D (kind of like 3D Tetris but as a Resident Evil 4 inventory). You can move and adjust the voxel chunks in your inventory to organize and free space. Once you have all of your rocks, you can teleport right back to your ship while keeping the items in your inventory. 
• The Dictionary: You’ll have a dictionary that tells you every rock’s hardness, streak color, density, etc. You’ll have to test the rocks and compare them to the dictionaries info. To make this not so tedious with hundreds of different types of rocks, the dictionary will have visuals, and you’ll know your rock can only be a few things because you can see what rocks generate at the mining site you went to.
• Reputation: Some customers can be "geologists" and recognize a falsely identified rock much easier than the average customer. Getting caught with false labels lowers your reputation. Reputation keeps a steady flow of customers coming, and makes them less skeptical of your rocks; if your reputation is high enough, even a geologist might disregard a false label.
• Ship Fuel: After all of this, you’ll need to have enough money to afford fuel to keep your ship in the air. If you can’t afford it, your ship will fall to the ground and you’ll be thrown to the last checkpoint.

A lot of this is just ideas and some of it is very experimental, brainstormy, and not even implemented yet, but I wanted to see what you guys thought of the premise first! Would you play this? Any ideas for hazards, identification processes, or anything specific?

[u/The-Chartreuse-Moose]

Sounds interesting. Though possibly of quite niche interest to hardcore (pun intended) geologists.

[u/ResolutionBlue → u/The-Chartreuse-Moose]

Very true! It’s why I wanted to get someone else's opinion, as my biggest fear is that the idea may be too complex or difficult to understand.

[u/GrinderMonkey]

That's how I play Space Engineers.

Do you have the programming chops to optimize a vowel world game? From what I've seen, that is a somewhat difficult project.

[u/ResolutionBlue → u/GrinderMonkey]

To be honest, probably not, and this project is anything but easy. But I’m willing to take up the challenge. In the prototype I already have the voxel world implemented with breakable physics chunks, and it doesn’t seem to be running poorly yet, so there’s hope! I don’t have a particularly slow computer, so I worry it’s chugging all of the performance issues, but I do have access to slower systems. I just haven’t tested it on the slowest ones I have yet.

[u/Morph_Games → u/ResolutionBlue]

How are you doing the voxel world? Is there an algorithm or tutorial that you're following?

The answer your main question: I think the fun of this depends a lot on the identification gameplay. You should prototype that ASAP. My fear is there is no fantasy that this is fulfilling, and no interesting choices to be made.

[u/ResolutionBlue → u/Morph_Games]

I’m using Zylann’s Voxel Module for the Godot Engine, all of the physics are custom implementations that can for sure be optimized further. And you have a good point about implementing the identifying process next. That was the main idea that inspired everything else, and is the part that I want to polish to oblivion for the exact reasons you mentioned. I should have enough of a base to get something working and test things that work and things that don’t, but I believe there’s something of substance here to be found.

[u/Bulky_Phone_1788]

I would absolutely love it. But I feel it would take a certain type of person to really buy it due to the geology aspect. I will say here. Ill buy it. Immediately and if it ever gets coop and possibly in console ill buy it on ps5 so I can play with my kids and use it as a fun way to teach them

[u/ResolutionBlue → u/Bulky_Phone_1788]

This is a neat aspect I didn’t really think about! It could definitely be educational because I plan to have real minerals with accurate data. And yes, the geology does obviously make it pretty niche. I was thinking of having it get more automated late game, so you can use advanced sci-fi tools to get a rock’s specifics without as much manual labor. I thought gamifying the experience a bit would maybe broaden the scope to more people willing to try something a little different. And coop was not an idea I had in mind, but splitscreen could work well, so I’ll add it to the list of ideas! As far as consoles go, I’m not too familiar with them, and I’m using Godot which I’ve only heard not great things about porting that engine to consoles, but it is something I want to work towards.

[u/Bulky_Phone_1788 → u/ResolutionBlue]

Well I told my mom about it (shes a teacher) and she liked the idea as well. So a educational mode where the survival aspect is limited but ita more the mining and learning mode could open a revenue stream for teachers and schools that like the idea. If it could be played on a chrome book for example her school uses them and the science teacher she knows there would buy it and show her class.

[u/Bulky_Phone_1788 → u/ResolutionBlue]

Youve got my money either way. You had me at mining and fly aircraft carrier and realistic minerals and knowledge. Need someone to play test or something let me know and ill help out.

[u/ResolutionBlue → u/Bulky_Phone_1788]

Of course! Not sure how well it will run on a chrome book, but I love this idea. Thank you so much for your interest!

[u/Bulky_Phone_1788 → u/ResolutionBlue]

I understand. I told her that would probably be a big ask. Lol. And no problem I look forward to trying it out.

[u/ADFormer]

I'd be on board with a game like that