Work on the next game continues... And it now has a name:

Deep Space Mining Corp.

Last week we showed the game at a developer event in Leeds, UK, and we were so happy to see strategy fans loving the idea.

So what is this idea?

Well, it involves a lot of drills, but also a lot of cards.

Drilling (and destroying) a planet

In our 'puzzle-y' turn-based game, the player builds up a drilling outpost to harvest crystals before the planet becomes too unstable to survive on.

To build things, you play cards.

We started off with the basics:

From there, we added resources that you spend to play cards, like energy.

Then it was time for the next evolution of card-holding: dynamically-moving hands!

We then added lots more information to the descriptions to make card actions easy to understand.

Then we thought: it's time to double down on the cards and add suits to the game. A building was activated by connected tiles with matching activated suits.

That worked for a while, but we wanted to have deeper strategy and that requires more variables to play with.

So we introduced card and building 'codes':

These codes mean you can only play a card on tiles that have some overlap in their code.

Hey, that looks like an improved zone outline!

While we're here, here's a bit of behind the scenes on how we made it:​

The system updates in-game according to which tiles you interact with on the planet's surface. Pretty cool!

We're really excited with where the game is going now, especially after demoing it for new people last week. The response was really positive, so we'll keep at it.

Next time I'll talk about all the Balatro-inspired moments we've had on our development journey so far...