Asteroid Mining Puzzle Thing - Update #1

Hi there! Thanks to everyone who's taken a look at this lil' puzzle game in its early days, I really appreciate your feedback. The short-term goals are mainly to stress test & tweak the mechanics until they're 100% rock solid, as well as to get an early handle on performance/compatibility to ensure that the core of this thing is fit 'n trim enough to run on a potato. On that front, tests with an Android build of the game are playing quite nicely on underpowered hardware.

After giving it some thought, I've decided to change the order that simultaneous item collisions are resolved to ensure that grabbers collect ore ahead of the upgrading action of explosions. What that means is if an ore is to be simultaneously hit by an explosion (upgrading it) and hit with a grabber (collecting it), the grabber will snatch the ore before the explosion advances its ore_type. More often than not, I've found myself angling for a golden ore and failing to anticipate that a bomb in the current item cluster is positioned to burn the ore to a crisp. Direct hits on ore with mining tools (drills/bombs/grabbers) will always resolve ahead of the upgrading action of explosions, which might have an added impact on drills/bombs in the future if the score penalty for ruining ore ends up being tied to ore_type (presently, there's a fixed -20 point penalty regardless of the ruined ore's grade).

Anyhow, there are some bits hiding behind the scenes right now, the most interesting being a "bounty/contract" layer on top of regular gameplay that introduces a specific goal (i.e. "harvest 10 ice," "break 10 drills," etc.). It might be fun if there were a selection of contracts to pick from with some sort of time sensitivity, like the goal needing to be reached within a single asteroid or something like that. I have bigger plans to build up a proper single-player campaign and a carefully constructed puzzle mode, but everything relies on the endless/arcade mode available now being as tight as possible.

Thanks again for checking this thing out! More updates as stuff of substances happens :)