The Missions system has been around for a while now. It was created to give the player objectives with a reward that can be used to unlock upgrade tiers.

While the idea was good, the missions did not seem to add the depth to the game that I hoped for. When completing a mission you would receive Artifacts. These 'Artifacts' were then used as a currency to unlock a next row of purchasable upgrades. To not immediately give the player enough of this currency after completing an amount of static missions, the unlock cost of the upgrade tier would be relatively high. As an added random factor it was possible to mine the Artifacts from the world.

The problem with that was that you'd race through the missions and could then spend a lot of timetrying to find artifacts to get your next unlock. With some bad luck you'd be stuck at Tier 1 upgrades for a while, which isn't all that fun.

Trying to come up with a clever way of handing out missions seemed too complex and the whole RPG style of collecting 'quests' just didn't feel right.

So how am I fixing this? Introducing 'Discoveries'!

The Discovery screen was implemented in Mines of Volantis a long time ago, but although the concept was nice, it had no real purpose and all of the testers told me they had seen the screen once and never bothered to ever open it again.

To get players to use this screen again to show them their progress of exploring Volantis, I transformed it into a screen with...well..progress bars. Instead of completing missions, the player can collect a certain amount of a resource and be rewarded with Discovery points (which replace Artifacts).

This hopefully will give short term goals combined with exploration progress.