A 3D mining game with fully destructible asteroids - could this be interesting?
I've seen a few comments around here from people who'd want a proper asteroid mining game, and that really interested me. Back when I played EVE, a lot of my friends were into mining - they'd sit there for hours doing it and genuinely loved it. So I've been thinking for a while about building a game around that, instead of treating mining as the boring part you do between the real content.
The idea is something fairly relaxing. Asteroids are fully destructible, so whatever you dig is actually gone, and every rock ends up shaped by how you cut it. Different resources require different ways of getting them out, rather than one drill for everything. Optional challenges if you want something harder than chill. And co-op, so you can just hang out with a friend and carve up a rock somewhere nice looking.
I only started on this recently, so the ten seconds here aren't pretty yet, the environment needs a lot of work. But you can see the modular ship, the mining itself, chunks coming off the asteroid, the laser and the thrusters, and the sun and planets behind it. I think it gets the idea across.
So could something like this actually be interesting to you?
And if it is, what do you picture when you think about a game like that?
Any mechanics or ideas you'd want in it?
What ideas I have now:
You fly a modular mining ship out to a field, pick an asteroid and cut it apart.
The rocks are voxel, so what you carve stays carved. There are different resources that require different approaches for example gas can explode if you collect it incorrectly or ice that doesn't fit in your cargo, so you need to haul big chunks of it outside the ship on the chain.
You haul what you pull out back to a station and sell it, and the money goes into upgrades and new parts: hulls, engines, wings, lasers, colours. Better gear reaches materials that need different methods to get at.
No combat, no survival. A few hours long (4-5), and it ends.