Hi everyone! Its finally time to talk about whats going on with us (Rocket Jump Technology) and King under the Mountain. As you might have seen in our previous updates, nearly a year ago we started working alongside a publisher on King under the Mountain. This allowed the game to move from a solo-dev hobby project to one being worked on with a small team full-time. Fantastic! The plan was to work on the game for a 9 month period, adding features and updates that both parties felt were missing in the initial Early Access release, and then re-release this as a new title under the publishers brand. Unfortunately, just as we got to the end of this 9 month development period, the publisher decided not to release the game as part of their portfolio. They were worried that a number of similar games that have released in the time between would cause it to struggle to stand out. Fortunately, however, weve signed a new agreement to allow Rocket Jump Technology to release the game independently, making use of the code and assets that were produced as part of the publisher-funded development. While this was initially disappointing, its still a very good outcome for everyone involved. We were left with essentially two choices: release everything weve done as a big update for King under the Mountain, or proceed with the original plan of a relaunch under a new title. Weve decided to go with the latter as its been so long since we were able to talk about King under the Mountain publicly that it will simply be much more likely to succeed with the update coming as part of a proper relaunch. A successful launch will mean well be able to keep that small team working full-time on the game, whereas an update to King under the Mountain, however large, would almost certainly fail to generate enough revenue to keep even one developer employed. It is with great pleasure that I can now announce the game is now known as Mountaincore. Its still the same game you might know and love, but this is the game I wanted to launch into Early Access, rather than being forced to do so early due to the circumstances of 2021. Mountaincore was chosen to be a mix of what some people see as quite a hardcore game (though its intended to be much more approachable than most in the genre) but also a game with a pleasant and relaxing aesthetic somewhat akin to cottagecore but with a dwarven mountainous focus, hence, Mountaincore. The most obvious change is that the game has a completely revamped UI, and weve added key features such as skill levels, combat, monsters, invasions, trading and more! This has been a fast moving situation as we only found out about the publishers decision in the final week of March, so were still putting things in place to relaunch the game as Mountaincore for example the games new logo is in progress but isnt ready to share yet. There will be a new Steam store page hopefully approved in the coming days with a placeholder logo and we are planning to launch Mountaincore on May 11th, just over a month from now. Only once the game is live will we be able to automatically grant access to all owners of King under the Mountain on Steam a copy of Mountaincore in their library. Theres good news though, as weve been promising this update for quite some time, we can also provide pre-launch keys to owners of King under the Mountain immediately. If youre happy to wait a bit longer, Mountaincore should appear automatically in your Steam library on May 11th. If you want to dig into the game straight away though, simply head to https://kutm-upgrade.herokuapp.com/ and sign in with your Steam account. We can use this to verify ownership of King under the Mountain, and if you own it, you will be assigned a pre-release Steam key for Mountaincore and can play straight away! Either way, the best way to stay up-to-date will be via our Discord Server. If you do claim your pre-release Mountaincore access, please do join in and let us know what you like or dont like about the big changes (or anything else youd like to see in the game!)

Whats Next?

Of course our immediate focus will be building up some hype for this re-release, along with fixing any bugs and making improvements before the official launch date. As mentioned above, this is what we envisioned as the real Early Access launch we were hoping to do, but it is still Early Access with lots more still to come. In the medium term the focus will be on adding progression systems to the game to give you reasons and challenges to keep playing for longer. Longer term we will be adding the off-map dungeon-crawl-style adventures which weve always seen as a key aspect of the game. Weve not forgotten any of the promises made in the Kickstarter and still have a number of rewards to deliver the most important being the Design a settler reward which well be aiming to fulfil in the short-to-medium term. For now though the goal will be on giving Mountaincore a successful launch which will determine just how quickly we can get future updates out to you. Most importantly, thank you all for your patience throughout what was a very long period with no public updates. It was just as frustrating for us as it was for you! We can and will be returning to the monthly dev update blog posts, you can expect the first of these at the end of this month, and Im very happy to be going back to an open and transparent dev cycle.

[ 2023-04-04 09:55:43 CET ] [ Original post ]