amiga-news.de - Mining strategy game: The history of "Aminer"

07.Apr.2025

Mining strategy game: The history of "Aminer"
"Last Minute Creations", a Polish group of Amiga game developers (e.g. GermZ or Chaos Arena), spent more than six years working on their mining strategy game "Aminer": set in the Soviet era, the aim is to fulfil the planned economic extraction plans and mine precious metals such as silver for the Ministry of Mining and Fossil Fuels:

"Last Minute Creations" consists of 'KaiN', who writes the code, 'Luc3k', who is responsible for the music and 'Softiron', who is responsible for all graphic tasks. We asked the coder 'KaiN' how the idea for the project came about and why Aminer, which was presented at the Polish retro party RAM#3 last weekend, took so long to develop:

"We started the project approximately a month before the RetroKomp 2018 party, for the game compo. We were working on OpenFire at that time, but I thought that it'd be cool to show something new at the party, so I've quickly came up with a game I wanted to tackle for some time now.

At this point it was a silly little game where you just dig through the ground without any objective and collect the resources, and also had a challenge mode where the camera goes at the constant speed towards the finish line and you must collect the resources to get the high score.

The idea behind the game was that I really liked the Motherload game from the Flash games era, and I wanted to do a semi-infinite Y scroll on Amiga hardware, so it was mostly a tech demo wrapped together as a RK18 game compo entry - it scored 2nd place and you can see on Pouet.net that it looked a bit differently back then.

Still, the audio was very buggy, because it was my groups first entry to even have audio code at all - we used my own ACE library, which I'm developing for 11 years now and those 6.5 years ago it lacked some serious features - it's now a lot more better since it got all the features needed to create the Aminer.

The game is written entirely in C, with one small part written in C++ for convenience, using the ACE library as I've mentioned. 'Softiron' uses Pro Motion NG for his pixels. For audio of the game compo version, I used sfxr to have some basics blips and blops. After all those years the pickup sound is still from the original version.

At this point we even didn't have an audio guy in our roster, but then we found Lucek on the Polish forums, and he did an amazing job of creating the matching soundtrack for the game. He also did the remaining audio stuff.
One of the main challenges was to determine what do we want to do with this game - we basically had no idea. After we did the demo for compo, 'Softiron' wasn't too happy with the state of the game and wanted to expand it a bit more. We've brainstormed a bit, I came with a little bit of ideas - mostly mimicking the Motherload game, so vehicle part upgrades, underground bases for convenience and that's about it. 'Softiron' on the other hand took that thing to the next level by inventing the whole soviet setting and adding a lot of side mechanics not really related with the digging itself - it's funny because you can finish the whole game without digging too much.

The other challenge was to stay on target and that's mostly because of me. During the pandemic, I thought it'd be nice to release another game to the Revision game compo, so we've started working on GermZ. We've missed the deadline, it then took us a whole lot of time to make this game enjoyable. We've also released two other games for game compos in the meantime: Atarenium Falkon (with code by 'Lucek!') and Chaos Arena, both released in Decrunch party game compos. As you can see we just can't leave a compo without an entry.

Another challenge was to settle on final features. 'Softiron' had lots of ideas for this game, including adding a way to go to moon and dig there, and we had to cut many of them to release the game at foreseeable time. We've also had the hard time with balancing the gameplay due to a lot of different allowed playstyles, mechanics and lots of content. It also became not so simple game, so it no longer would be enjoyed by younger or less demanding audiences. I've mitigated that by adding a Sandbox mode in final weeks, which resembles the free digging mode from the compo version with some basic limited move count mechanics. The most difficult thing for me personally was to get the mood right. Since the game is set in the soviet era in not-so-fictional country, and touches on totalitarian regimes of the past, I hope the game won't be viewed as making those things "cool", because they really aren't. And we shouldn't forget about this, especially now that one of them is coming back from hiatus.

Besides all these explanations, why did it ultimately take so long? Well, we did:

3 kilometers of the underground mine to explore
8 NPCs
7 distinct endings
3 underground bases with base building mechanics
18 achievements
3 game modes and a co-op variant of each mode
2 language versions
more than 20 minutes of soundtrack
definitely no secrets
all that crammed into a single floppy disk, if you want to torture yourself with loading times

If you want to take on the task and dig through the earth, you need an OCS Amiga with 1MB chip RAM and 1MB other RAM. The source code is available on GitHub. (dr)

[News message: 07. Apr. 2025, 10:09] [Comments: 0]
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