During the development of Mines of Volantis I've thought about countless cool features and have been suggested even more. All of these ideas on their own could possible be really great, but how do you know which ones would actually contribute to a fun gaming experience?

The most important part of a game is the core gameplay loop. Mines of Volantis makes you dig for resources until your cargo is full or your fuel is almost empty. Then you return to sell your valuable loot and to refuel.

On short term this is fun, but it would get very tedious if you didn't have any goal to accomplish with it. For this reason I also added upgrades that can purchased with credits. Having an upgrade system is a very obvious feature to have, since MoV is mostly based on Motherload (a classic Flash game that was insanely popular back in the day).

With the digging and upgrades features fleshed out I had a game that was fun, but the level of engagement would typically last around 10 to 20 minutes (depending on the type of player). Acquiring upgrades can be seen as reaching goals, but in reality you have to dig up a lot of resources to be able to afford them. Farming isn't fun, so a new feature had to be introduced.

To give incentive to dig resources, I created the Discoveries system. Every 10th of a specific type of resource collected would give you Discovery points. With a certain amount of these points you could unlock new tiers of upgrades! Oh and for a brief moment before this there was a Missions system, but it didn't change anything except adding 'story' to the farming. It got removed very fast.

Okay, so now we still have to farm for upgrades AND we have to unlock them? While it keeps the player busy for a while, it bores them out eventually after unlocking tier 2 and discovering tier 3 is basically the same thing.

So how can be prevent the player from getting bored? We have to go back to the beginning and think about all the cool stuff that has been suggested. People like to see new and exciting things in a game and I have to give it to them.

The solution I came up with is the Research system. This gives the player access to gameplay altering changes to make tedious tasks more easy, like flying faster and teleporting. They can be unlocked fairly easy by collecting 'tech' blocks which give research points which are relatively easy to find and are much less of a grind than with the upgrades.

So the gameplay loop now looks a bit different. The player goes out to dig up resources to sell for credits, saves up for upgrades that make the 'work' easier. Finds research points along the way to spend on cool stuff. 

Hard work is rewarded now and the player can keep looking forward to gameplay altering changes. So now we have a short term goal and medium term goal. The missing piece of the puzzle is a long term goal, which will be beating the game. For now I have the feeling MoV is going the right way to keep players engaged and for them to have fun.