Another step to give more power to players

When I was young, I would play for hours and hours (and some more) with Construx. I never really bothered to build the models shown on the boxes. I guess that since they were showing it on the box, it was obvious that I could build it so there wasn't any point doing so. My fun was to create, experiment, try new things.

The project I was the most proud of was a simple driving game. Using the Power Pack, I fixed a long sheet of paper wrapped around wheels so it would rotate and fixed some kind of driving wheel on top of it with a small toy car. The point was to follow the road drawn on the sheet of paper while avoiding the wholes cut in it.

Now, I guess I'm trying to provide some of the same fun with Golemizer. The latest update gives players the opportunity to dig their own dungeon while gathering resources by using mining golems.

Mining golems are used in the underground in (currently) private basements players can create using another item (called Level Stairs). By ordering their golems to /dig [direction], they will create another zone in that direction. If they're interested to also gather resources, they can instead use the /mine [direction] command which will dig a new zone at a slower rate but might also get some resources as iron, copper, uranium, ...

While it's still not much to create content, it's another step so players can one day build real dungeons filled with monsters, traps, treasures, ...

Now I know that someone will probably come and show me that pyramid telling that only about 1% of players are of the builder type. Not everyone will enjoy this new system and that's why actual mining is there. I'm also planning to add some type of random events when a new zone is created. Things like artifact discovered, some weird underground monsters that have been awakened and maybe some fossils (why not let players create dinosaurs!).

Anyway, Golemizer is about trying something different. Will this make Golemizer a popular game? Who knows, but at least I'm having fun with it.

You can read the update notes here.

note: Some MMOs might have similar systems, I'm not aware of every games out there. But I would appreciate to know about them to improve this idea.