Potato Miners – Design


Narrative

The game is about two little potatoes who came to life with the sole purpose of becoming extremely rich. One day they stumbled upon a treasure map, leading them towards a large underground cave system.

As they absolutely do NOT like sharing ANYTHING wealth related, they will have to compete with one another to find out who can find and claim the treasure first!


gameplay-loop

Potato Miners is played in matches of 1 versus 1 (local splitscreen). The gameplay-loop for each player consists of four main elements:

  1. Expanding
  2. Gathering
  3. Upgrading
  4. Defending

These steps will be repeated until a winner comes forth.


expanding

In the expanding phase of the gameplay-loop the player will attempt to expand their mineshaft by mining blocks, and placing wooden supports (to make sure the shaft doesn’t collapse) in the hope of finding valuable resources.


Gathering

Once resources of value have been located, the players will attempt to harvest them to be sold at the base later. The higher the value of the resource, the higher the pickaxe level of the players must be to mine it.

After the resources have been gathered the players will go back to their own base and sell them for coin.


Upgrading

The players can use their earned coin to upgrade their gear. They can either upgrade their sight (visibility in the dark, and mining range), or their pickaxe level.


Defending

The players can polish the walls of their mineshaft for a short period of time to keep other players out. In order to keep the base safe, the players will have to repeat this process through the match.


winning

To win a match of Potato Miners, a player has to first locate the treasure room (which is randomly spawned somewhere in the world), and secondly acquire a high enough pickaxe level to break through its walls.