Cubey Quarry
Cubey Quarry is the beauty of the first release I have ever done, since it was my first I also decided it was only going to show my name and work, so I made it free to play. This choice made a sudden burst in viewership and made a huge difference, as I had no marketing and only ever made this to prove to myself that I could.
The design choice of having the orthographic camera view instead of perspective gave it a different vibe than what you are used to, so you can clearly see all of the models are 3d, but it changes your perspective that it’s just a small little world you look at from a distance.
It was inspired by the method of sped up “tilt shift”. Tilt-shift lenses allow photographers to manipulate the plane of focus and perspective in their images, often creating a miniature effect. This is done by tilting and shifting the lens elements relative to the camera's sensor.
So in this instance it creates the effect of having your own little world, with tiny people.
The gameplay
The gameplay is focused off of 2 ways of playing idler, the active user and the passive user.
The active user can make use of the pickaxe, which is essentially just clicking, and the clicking has no limits as you can click every single frame your computer has, making it very active. Now when you’ve clicked enough times you can dump your entire ore stash into the smelter which instantly converts ore to gold making it also active.
The passive user can utilise the grinder and drill, the drill was the original idea of making players “invest” their clicks, as over time the drill would extract more ores than you would get using the pickaxe, and the grinder would be an investment directly based on the ores you have as you can put one in and then double the outcome, multiple times, only downside is that it takes time with both of these mechanics.
Networking
Networking was done using the new Purrnet, developed by my friend Bobsi, as this is a new tool and I have a personal interest in, then it was an obvious choice to use this. Since I got help and a lot of walkthrough using the new networking I learned a lot from it and can definitely recommend using it, of course with the updated documentation following it.
So in the future I will be going to use this tool again for next projects, as all features in the game including multiplayer works as intended.
Performance
There is not much to say about performance running Cubey Quarry, it’s all set to one scene which does not even have more than 20 gameobjects at once. This being said when it comes to lighting a lot of time were spent on it.
I wanted to have the charm of having lighting change based on the time of day in real life, so all of the lighting in the game is real-time and did cause a lot of CPU usage before optimising it with v-sync as well as reducing frame rate limit.
I bet it’s a small question in your head, so what makes it unique compared to usual idlers? Well first of all it’s a co-op based idler where features are, you can improve time and also share with your friends your gameplay.
It was a last minute addition before the release but i added a feature where a portal can open up, if used by 2 players it’s free and single player for a fee. This event is time based and may require a friend to fully complete and get the most out of it, but not much else is different as I did not put more time into content after that.