Ore Miner Classic (OMC) is a clicking game with crafting and character progression, developed by Domen Koneski from Studio Techtrics. The game is only available on Android and was developed in Android Studio using Java.
The porting project was started in January 2016. The plan was to port the game’s features as they were then. Ore Miner Classic did not have any social features or multi-player. The game was however to be developed in parallel with the Unity port, meaning it would get extra features as the port tried to catch up. The idea, however, was to eventually sunset the Android-only build of OMC and unify the code-base to make it easier to develop for both platforms.
From nothing to something
Something may be generous, looking back at it, but let’s say it was at least more than nothing.
As development on the Unity port started, the plan was to first develop a stub version of the user interface, followed by the code to run it. This would then be followed by fairly ad-hoc iteration and improvements. This plan, of course, didn’t survive first contact with reality. As always, the first few weeks showed rapid growth, which was very visual in nature. Within the first two weeks, a stub version of the user interface was built. We intentionally kept the stub icons around for quite a while, to make it completely obvious what is final and what still needs to be replaced.
Getting it to work right
As it turns out, the game was way more complex under the hood as we first imagined. We did see that each player has seven parameters to them, and that each tool has seven more, and stones are interchangeable, and then there are potions, two passive generators, lottery tickets, micro-transaction items, etc. etc. etc. Needless to say, the game was much, much more complex than expected. Unfortunately this complexity wasn’t communicated well to the player. There were one of three decisions we could really have taken here:
- the game could be ported to Unity as it was then,
- the underlying model could be simplified to make more approachable and understandable,
- or we could redesign the user interface to better communicate what the game was doing so players could make informed decisions.
We wanted to keep the port identical to OMC, we wanted to simplify it. At this stage, keeping it the same won out.
After having been watching the placeholder icons for quite some time, we did replace them with actual icons from Ore Miner Classic. The menus and their layouts however largely remained the same.
