Ore Rush: Mining Tycoon

Inspiration

As avid mobile game enjoyers, we were excited to get the opportunity to develop one for Horizon Worlds. We wanted to make an incremental game for mobile that offered a good user experience, with emphasis on progression and infinite scalable systems. We designed a world with that in mind and Ore Rush: Mining Tycoon was born. A game where players can compete with their friends at their own pace, a relaxing experience that lets players dive into the mines, collect exciting minerals, sell them for coins, and upgrade your equipment. Earn points and top the leaderboard.

Gameplay Overview

In Ore Rush: Mining Tycoon, you explore caves and mine for minerals. The players main goal is to find new minerals, sell them and upgrade your equipment! The amount of minerals spawned per cave is ever changing, and you will find new minerals which is worth more and more to help you buy better gear for your next dive!

How we built it

The Mines

We designed the cave variations manually and created an automatic system that randomly places ores within the spawned cave. The caves are spawned randomly so that the player never progresses into the same mine in succession. The surface area and caves where all created using Horizons 3D model gen AI. We extracted some of the generated assets to decrease the polycount and re-imported them to Horizon for increased optimization.

Ore & mineral spawning

The first 10 mines the player experiences are design manually with a set layout, and predefined amount of minerals and ores. This ensures a controllable first time user experience. After these preset mines, the layout is then randomly selected, and the ores are randomly placed within a predefined grid. The amount of ores can vary from 8-12 per room, and the amount of minerals in each ore is distributed randomly.

Noesis

We utilized Noesis to create our UI. We used its animation capabilities to create a smooth UI which ensure the best user experience. It was easy to create an appealing art style using this tool.

Upgradeable equipment

We created equipment icons that visually progress to fit the players equipment level. We implemented the icon changes through Noesis.

Tap-to-Move

We were excited to use the new movement type supported by Horizon. We were able to use the NPC pathing system in Horizon to allow the player avatar to navigate around obstacles.

Challenges we ran into

Noesis scaling - Noesis does not support Layoutscaler. So we created a custom UI scaler to allow the UI to function on all mobile screen sizes.

Noesis UI interactions - Interacting with the UI, the players input would pass through the UI onto the world, despite the UI setting being set to 'Blocking'. We created a buffering input system as a work around to solve this issue

Noesis + Tap to move - The swiping visualizer doesn't play with Noesis and the tap to move system. Causing a noticeable while screen element to jump around the screen. We had trouble hiding this visualizer, as to remained visible even after se disabled it.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Noesis - Creating the Layout scaler work around

Overall game feel - We really pleased that create a cohesive art style throughout both the UI and 3D world.

Game mascot - We are really happy with the cute dragon mascot we created for the game.

Game design - We are proud of the robust and expandable game loop we have created.

What's next for Ore Rush: Mining Tycoon

As we've laid a good foundation and framework to build on, we want to add new locations using Horizons world instancing feature for players to unlock, with different themes for the mines. And more places for the players to explore and unlock with new and exciting minerals.

We plan to increase the amount of gold the player can earn. We want to add a smelter feature that increases the values of the minerals you've found, by smelting it down over several hours, with offline progression. This will give an incentive for players to return to the game to collect their smelted minerals.

Additionally, we would like to implement a farming system that allows users to plant and farm crystals they find in the mines. These grown crystals can then be used to upgrade to special equipment, as well as be used to supercharge the player for a limited time.

Built With

• affinity
• horizonworlds
• noesis
• typescript