I figured I may as well make a small progress report on the side project I am working on, and more info on it now. Because at the rate I am going, I'll probably have it playable within a few days.

First of all is info on the game.
The game is a competitive mining game. The goal is to mine a specific amount of points to win. (You can also win if the entire enemy team dies)

You do not directly mine for stuff. Instead you're given control of 5 units. You get to pick a race for these units at the beginning of each match, each has their own strengths and weaknesss.
You control these units with very simple commands. Such as walk left, dig right, and so on. They will execute the command you give them until you either tell them to stop, they are unable to follow the command anymore (cannot walk through walls) or they die.
These units have no brain of their own. If you tell them to walk left, they will walk left even if this means they fall into a pit of lava.

I'm not really sure what I would class the game as, but it is more of a strategy game than anything else.

The games setting is... Cubular to say the least. It is in most ways generic fantasy, but everything has a very square spin on it.
Because everything is square. People are square, trees are square, everything is square!
This gives the game a unique style, and just makes stuff easier to draw, since I am lazy.

The four races you can pick are all based on generic fantasy races, and all some sort of pun.
Blockmans are Humans. Average at everything.
Blockisms are Dwarfs. Good at mining, but not much else.
Blorcks are Orcs. Good at fighting, bad at everything else.
And Blockracy are Elfs. Good at running, but bad at other stuff.

Each one has their own use. If you pick Blorcks, and someone else picks Blockisms. You will not beat them in a fair mining match up.
But you will find it much easier to will by killing all of the enemies units. Or if you want to play fair, will be able to plunder valuable treasure with much more ease.

At the moment, I intend to let people run their own servers. With no real cap on players.
Players will login, be put in a chatroom, where they can organize games among themselves and what not. I have no idea how well this will work however, or what the limits to it will be.

http://www.byond.com/members/TheMagicMan/files/blocks1.png
That is what the chatroom at the moment looks like.
It is fairly easy to use, just click create game to make a game, and click a player who is looking for players to join in with them.
I will possibly add spectating to the game as well.

As for what the actual game looks like...
http://www.byond.com/members/TheMagicMan/files/blocks2.png
That is an ingame screenshot.
As you can see, everything is very square in it.
It should also be very easy to use and understand. You click a unit, then in the bottom corner click a button to issue a command. That is about all.
The numbers correspond to different units. You can click them for quick access, and the colour of the number represents the units action (grey = idle, yellow = busy, red = fighting and black = dead).


http://www.byond.com/members/TheMagicMan/files/blocks3.png
Here is one more screenshot, of the game in progress.


At the moment, I have done all the match making functions. They work fine with testing with myself. Games start and end properly.
I have done the basic AI as well, but fighting is not done yet.
I need to finish fighting, then add stuff like death and what not to the game. Once that is done, and a few more maps are added, the game will be ready for testing.
I expect this to be done within the next few days.

In the future I will probably add some sort of shop that sells usable items and tools. But buying items will require you to use up points you have gathered. So you will have to make smart use of them.
Items will include stuff like TNT to destroy rock, walls/floors to block off areas and walk over, tools to increase a stat and maybe a few other small things.

I am also making the game easy to manipulate. It uses external files for maps that can easily be loaded. Making a map editor would be easy.
I may also simply just release the source code.

Once I get the game playable, I'll update with news and probably host it for a few days for testing.