Lunar Mines Developer on Why Blockchain Technology Gives Freedom to Create
EGX 2018 has been one of the busiest times for VGR, why? Because there’s so many great games, and so little time for me to go out there and speak to people about them. That said, I’ve done my best and managed to talk to Gareth Jenkins, the developer behind the minimalistic, city-building sci-fi game, Lunar Mines.
In this Lunar Mines interview, we spoke about space exploration, communities, blockchain technology and much, much more. Do check it out and let us know what you think.
Aimee Hart: Okay, so I was intrigued reading about this. Because I know only a little about blockchain technology and Lunar Mines is built off that. Do you need to know a lot about blockchain technology to play this game?
Gareth Jenkins: No, not really. Of course there are some things that you need to do. You need to be able to set up a wallet to own the things you produce in the game. We do have guidance on how you can do that, we’ll help you go through the process. There’s nothing really difficult about that, but if you need help then details are all on the website.
I don’t want to say no, you don’t need to know anything at all because that isn’t completely correct. You are going to need to do some things that coincide with the plan for the game, but I don’t see that being a big problem. So if you’re completing a task for other players and receiving payments. As a result, there’s a motivation there to go through that process because they want to receive the payments.
I think if you have someone who’s not open-minded about using new technology and things like that, then maybe it [Lunar Mines] isn’t for you. But there are plenty of people who are, so I’m quite comfortable with that.
AH: Well that’s good! So, what inspired you to choose the moon as your setting for this game? I mean, apart from the obvious name [laughs]. Were there any real-life events that made you think ‘Oh I’m quite interested in that’, or were you always interested in creating a game like this?
GJ: So I’ve been working on blockchain games for four years now. I created some of the earliest technology for doing blockchain games and I just continue to work on all of that technology, For the past four years we’ve been making games on that, but the games we were making were more traditional. So we made a trading card game, an action fighting game, those kinds of things.
They were really great as games, but to show off the blockchain technology? They were a little bit too far removed from it. I wanted to come up with something that was a bit more direct, like a direct abstraction on top of the blockchain technology. The things that you own in the contracts that you complete with other players are representations of all those blockchain transactions.
So when I was looking for a genre to kind of place all this in, space seemed like an obvious one. There’s new technologies, mathematics, all of these things work quite well in this setting. I don’t think this would work in the fantasy genre at all. So yes, space seemed the obvious choice.
AH: And the mining aspect?
GJ: That came from a GameJam game I spent time on years ago, which was just on these spheres and it didn’t necessarily need to be moons or planets or anything, but they did look like them. So I kind of already had that in my head. So I started to look at other related things like games and books, and I was just reading things like mining on moons, which people are actually starting to do, as well sending things out into space, resources and such.
AH: That’s interesting. I know that there is building and mining, but is there a crafting system as well in Lunar Mines?
GJ: There isn’t ‘traditional crafting’. What happens is once you build your mines, they produce refined minerals, connect different moons together to a relay and then that relay produces alloys, which then probes into space. There’s a lot of different alloys and minerals, and you get to choose which alloy you want to produce based on the moon connected to it, with each alloy having different properties. So some of them can send probes further, some of them can carry more materials, some of them are more accurate when they arrive at their destination, all these kinds of things. That effectively is a crafting system because you’re making decisions about which different components you’re going to use.
The other aspect is that when you arrive at new moons, you need to get resources to build in the first place, like building materials. There’s a couple of different ways of getting them: you can pay other players [with ethereum], you send out a probe. There are quite a few different mechanics.
AH: Could you talk to me about the multiplayer aspect of Lunar Mines?
GJ: There’s a single galaxy that’s got hundreds of billions of stars in it, a bunch of planets and potentially trillions of moons. You can go in and you can find moons from the mining authority, which finds moons straightaway by sending probes into space. You are doing that in the same world as other players out there. There’s a motivation to try and find areas of space other plays haven’t been in because when you do that you’ll be given an ownership of the moon within the system that you arrive at. If someone already owns that system? You won’t be able to unless you go through the mining authority.
In that way, players are given the motivation to explore space and find places that other people haven’t been, and obviously, with hundreds of billions of star systems, this should be pretty straightforward. Of course, if it gets to the point the game gets completely saturated we will do something about that.
AH: What about groups and communities? Will there be anything like that in Lunar Mines?
GJ: I suspect there will be. One of the reasons why I wanted to make this a complete abstraction from blockchain technology is to give players room to build other things on top of that and share with others. Of course, you can control what will be public apart from your Operator ID. That will always be public, so players can know who owns which moon. You can enable a fully public profile, that’s completely up to the player.
I do expect that players will build on top of that and come together in groups in order to manage resources. There’s a lot of different minerals and resources that you can collect, and your mine will work a lot more efficiently if you have a group of people helping you out, rather than just trying to find individual players each time you need help at that time.
AH: You’ve mentioned space exploration. How does that work, will we see it visually?
GJ: You will be moving around through star-systems and such and there will be visualizations of moving between them, but it is intentionally abstract. When your probe gets to the star system, you will be able to control it and move around to find out more information.
AH: There’s one thing that I didn’t expect about this game. It really is rather relaxing. Was that intended?
GJ: There was actually a GameJam game that motivated the mechanic for the mine-building path. I originally built it to be a weird action game, but playing it turned out to be super relaxing. So in a way, I already knew it was [relaxing] like that. But [building mines] is still quite skill-demanding, it isn’t easy to build the mine and make them efficient. But at the same time, sitting there and moving them around and constructing buildings is very relaxing, so yeah I did know that so I’ve made sure not to take away from that feeling.
There are other mechanics in the game which all connect to one another, but not piled on one another so you can do separate activities. One day you may just be building some mines, the next day you might be doing contracts for other players and reading notifications and I think that helps because there are different things that are relaxing for different people. What may relax one person might terrify the next.
AH: So, when we can expect to see Lunar Mines?
GJ: It’s going to go public by the end of the year. There’s not really any public information about it at the moment. You can sign up for email news on the website, and we will be launching a waiting list which will allow people to get access to the first moon rights and things like that.
AH: Thank you so much for talking with me and VGR, Gareth. I wish you and Lunar Mines the best of luck and I can’t wait to give it a try.
Are you intrigued by Lunar Mines? You can sign up for news about the game right here. Seriously, go do that, because this game? It deserves your attention.
Let us know what you think about this interview in our VGR forums.