arielsan

Game Dev, making Ship Miner https://shipminer.arielcoppes.dev/

[arielcoppes]

This is Ship Miner, a 1bit pixelart scifi mining game I am developing for steam.

[arielcoppes]

Did this recently for twitter/etc and it was super fun to made, I had to learn new techniques in davinci resolve that I could use in the future. Just wanted to share it here too. The tagline was "My game Ship Miner will take you back to the '80s and '90s".

[arielcoppes]

Just sharing some gifs of the day.

I was recording gifs to have for presskit/etc, and decided to share them because they look interesting.

If you don't know, Ship Miner is an action roguelike game about mining asteroids. It has a steam page in case in case you want to add to your wishlist.

Ship Miner on Steam

Relaxing mining experience that merges combat elements and 1-bit pixel art aesthetics. Collect minerals from procedurally generated asteroid

Thanks for reading!!

[arielcoppes]

How I use ECS in making games second part

It's been a while since I do a semi technical blog post but here I am, sharing my second part of the "how I use ECS in my games" series (in 2.5y I will write the 3rd part xD):

Design decisions when building games using ECS II

This is just the second part to the “Design decisions when building games using ECS” since I have new patterns that I want to share.

If you are using ECS, would love to hear your thoughts.

Thanks for reading!

[arielcoppes]

arielsan turned 8 today!

[arielcoppes]

My 2025 summary and my expectations for 2026

Every year I take some time to write a review about it and my expectations for the next one personally and for my projects. I mention both Cleared Hot and Ship Miner in my review, here it is if you want to read it:

2025 summary and my expectations for 2026

The end of the year is approaching and I have made a summary of what happened during 2025 and what to expect for 2026.

[arielcoppes]

When you start playing being a gamdev and decide to implement your own pathfinding solution (because you know, there are not 100 already), instead of making the actual game xD.

[arielcoppes]

Random video but with full audio (music too) in this case.

Random note: 1-bit graphics are difficult to read from videos/screenshots but they have some kind of magic. Also, they are easier to assimilate by playing the game (demo available btw).

[arielcoppes]

Don't let enemy miners steal your minerals xD

[arielcoppes]

Hey, I did this game with a friend for a gamejam, it is called Faster Than Luck and it was made for the GBJAM13, the theme for this year was "Unlucky".

The game is some kind of Faster Than Light were you have to manage different resources, including luckies, to escape from the Unfortunate galaxy... or return to it, forever....

Here is the link to play it:

Faster Than Luck by arielsan, Esti

Escape the Unfortunate Galaxy in a FTL-like adventure where bad luck is one step behind.

[arielcoppes]

Just random video of the game

[arielcoppes]

This is Ship Miner, a twin stick 1-bit PixelArt mining game I am developing for Steam. I am working on a having a private Playtest before having the public Demo, subscribe to the Newsletter or join Discord.

More info at

Home

Ship Miner Dev Log

[arielcoppes]

In Ship Miner there are some Space Stations around asteroids where you can build drones to help with the task of mining and more. This also helps making exploration more rewarding I think.

[arielcoppes]

Doing Marketing for Ship Miner

After a year of working on how to market my game Ship Miner I want to share part of my experience and learning about it.

I wrote a blog post about how I am doing the marketing of Ship Miner and what I learned the last year of working on that.

Hope this information could be of help for others and that you like the content.

[arielcoppes]

Maybe sometimes you could get help from other "automated" miners... at least to find bugs in the code... I suppose this "development feature" started to feel like a thing to have in the game xD

[arielcoppes]

Testing some automatic players so I can stress test the game for bugs, but also could be the base for automated miners (for enemies and/or for friendly drones)

[arielcoppes]

Last week I started playing a bit with generating the asteroids shapes for Ship Miner with a bit of procgen and it is super fun and rewarding.

I was already doing procgen for the minerals spots but the asteroid shapes were predefined since I wanted to control that in order to find the core loop of the game. Now that I have some core loop defined, I can create the shapes considering that.

But one difference now is I wanted to have something visual, consistent (control the seed) and be able to do step by step, so if something goes wrong with the generation, I can adjust the logic and test again and see where it is failing, etc.

Next step is to try to integrate the minerals generation into the shape process and also visualize that better since not having visualization and replication makes procgen super harder.