Steam Next Fest Recap

Hey everyone!

As we're nearing the end of Steam Next Fest, I wanted to write this post to first of all thank you for playing the Mining Merchant demo and secondly to address some concerns that were shared by the community.

If you haven't had a chance to play the demo yet; don't worry, the demo will remain available even after Steam Next Fest ends. And if you have played it, please don't forget to add it to your Steam wishlist. You can check it out right here:

5 Million!

Let me start off with a big thank you to all people who showed up to play the demo. Thousands of players jumped in and mined over 5 million tiles in just a couple days, which was really fun to see. I've also seen a lot of players show up who had already played my previous games and it's just been very nice to see people have stuck around since then. Thanks for the support, it really means a lot to me!

Feedback

Throughout the week I got a lot of feedback about the game through Discord, Steam Community Hub and even directly from players as I joined random lobbies to ask for feedback. I'd like to share the biggest learnings I got and what changes I'm planning to make as a result of this.

The crafting system

By far the most mentioned was the crafting mechanic. It's fair to say it's gotten mixed reception as people either seem to love it or hate it. I had obviously hoped for everyone to love it, so I'm sorry for missing the mark here for a lot of you. Luckily, there's still time to improve before full launch, so let me explain what I'm planning to do.

There seem to be two major pain points here. The clunkiness of the system, and the repetitiveness when having to craft a lot of items.

• For the clunkiness, I feel like this is caused mostly by the fact that you have to manually drag everything around. I've already reworked the crafting system during Next Fest to require less object dragging. For example, selecting the handle of the ingot press will automatically have it rotate, and selecting the smithing hammer will automatically move it in the right position, where you can just click to have it hit the anvil. This update is already live on the beta branch.
• Then there's the repetitiveness of this system. To address this, I'm planning on adding automation mechanics, which will allow players to automate the crafting once they've 'discovered' new items. What I mean by this is that you need to craft it once by hand, and from there you can choose to either automate the production, or keep crafting by hand. The speed and quantity of automated crafting will be based on the level of your workstations as these are upgradable (not in the demo).
• In addition to this, please keep in mind that there was already a bulk crafting option in the game, that would allow you to make up to 20 items at once based on your workstation level. So even for manual crafting, you would not have to individually craft every single item.

Shopkeeping

The second most mentioned was the shopkeeping part of the game. Based on all the feedback I got I think most people seem to enjoy the shopping phase, but were also a bit worried about repetitiveness and scalability.

• As your shop scales by adding additional floors and unlocking more rooms, you'll get additional inventory slots in your 'hand inventory'. This means you can pick up multiple items from the storage racks and instantly refill multiple displays. This keeps stuff more manageable and reduces the amount of walking around.
• We're also planning on automating part of the shop, by either adding staff to do tasks for you such as refilling displays and helping customers check out. Alternatively, we're considering for higher level checkout areas to contain self-checkout stations so customers can check out autonomously.

Other things

Obviously there's a ton of other things to be improved, bugs to be fixed and quality of life changes to be made. I'm well aware the game is far from perfect, but rest assured I'm working tirelessly every day to get the game in the best possible shape on launch.

As you might have seen, I had already decided to push the release date to May 1st before Next Fest to give myself a little bit more time to implement any feedback I'd be getting. With all the feedback I got in mind, I think that was a wise move as I really think the game will benefit from all the improvements you all pointed out.

Full game vs Demo

Lastly, I want to share some info around how the demo compares to the full game. While all the concerns and feedback is totally valid, please keep in mind that there is much more to the game than was included in the demo. A lot of new mechanics are introduced in the second and third in-game week to avoid overwhelming the player with all these systems from the get go. This means that the demo is missing a lot of things that are in the full game, workstation upgrading which allows bulk production, mech unlocking and upgrading, companion bots, multiple maps with a wide variety of biomes, and a lot more. The demo is also light on story, as there's already a lot of tutorials and introductions in the first half hour of the game and I didn't want to overload the player with too much dialogue right from the start. Story pace picks up once tutorials and base systems are introduced and explained.

Alright, that's it for this little Steam Next Fest recap. If you're excited for full launch, please don't forget to add Mining Merchant to your wishlist to get notified when the game launches. I'm planning on running a big launch discount for everyone who supports the game on launch, so you don't want to miss that!