New user interface and features
We were now approaching the expected deadline, but still had a few weeks time to finish up and polish what we had. Plans changed, however: A new user interface was created and a new feature was requested: stone destruction – as you tapped on the stone, it would slowly decay and drop an item at the end. In Ore Miner Classic, the game dropped materials, potions and equipment with a random chance – this chance could be improved with various temporary and permanent modifiers. This mechanic was however made meaningless with the new stone decay system and needed to be be replaced with a speed-up to stone destruction, thus changing the previously derived model in a fairly significant way.
Kaja Lipušček designed the new user interface. The UI is definitely a step-up from OMC, implementing it however required time, thus pushing the release time back. A second developer, Vili Volčini was reassigned to this port to speed up development. At this point, however, calling it a port lost its meaning, since the new UI and features changed the game quite significantly. Implementing the new UI was done in several steps. The first pass implemented a rough version of it and a second pass refined it. At this point the UI was presentable and more or less finalized. The mathematical model was adapted as needed and the game was released on the Apple App Store for iOS in June 2016.
1.0 is here
After having released the game on the App store, we went to work on fixing the most crucial bugs which our QA team missed. Within a few weeks, we had 1.02 on the store. The future for Ore Miner on iOS and Ore Miner Classic on Android seems very bright.
