Hi everyone! May was a particularly exciting month because… we launched into Early Access!!

I’m very happy with the response from most people so far, lots and lots of you are enjoying it, many YouTube and Twitch streamers have picked up the game and almost all of those enjoyed it too, though unfortunately Mountaincore is sitting at “Mixed” on Steam due to hovering just under 70% positive reviews. If you’ve bought the game directly on Steam (and I believe previously purchasing King under the Mountain from Steam would count as well) and you’re enjoying it so far and eager to see what we can add to the game, please leave a positive review. There’s no greater impact on the sales (or not) of a game if someone gets to a store page with the difference between “Mixed” and “Positive” for the overall reviews. Sadly all the keys granted for the pre-Early Access don’t count to the review score, or we’d be sitting at 85% Very Positive! So that’s a real shame, because the game sitting on “Mixed” will kill off what are already pretty mediocre sales figures and we simply won’t be able to afford to see out the full roadmap of what I want this game to develop into throughout Early Access.

As mentioned there, sales have been pretty poor but about what I was expecting given that we were forced to release Mountaincore on very short notice – after being forced to “go dark” on comms for so long – after the publisher backed out, and the reliance was on the publisher to cover marketing which hasn’t happened. That can’t be helped now though, and there’s a good base to build on so there’s still hope that as we add more to the game, add polish and fix the issues that people are having, perhaps it will start to attract a wider audience.

The real bad news is that with such poor sales, we can’t afford to continue the small-team full-time development the game has benefitted from over the past year. Mountaincore will have to go back to being a solo-dev hobby project that I work on whenever I can in my free time, and any revenue generated will go towards commissioning freelancers to produce artwork and the other assets that are needed to see out the rest of the roadmap.

So on that note, we have an updated roadmap! As mentioned on the Roadmap page, it’s been broken up into a main part of the roadmap, and a series of “Stretch Goals” which I’d love to add but will depend on the game finding enough success to finance it. I’ve been working on Mountaincore for close to 8 years now, and progress will probably be relatively slow while it’s just done in my free evenings by a single developer, so I need to keep the upcoming roadmap to something manageable. This means I’ve cut back a bit on the scope creep that was afflicting the King under the Mountain roadmap if you were familiar with the “old” roadmap. That said, I’m pretty sure there’s already some things I intend to add to this roadmap, and/or some small updates from the feedback and suggestions given so far in the Discord server that didn’t need their own section. Anything really important that we’re missing? Well, yes, there’s many many things that could be added to this game. Let me know in the comments or on Discord!

In June I’ll still be responding to the feedback received on improvements for the existing features and systems in the game, as well as some bugs we’ve still to get under control. Turns out that it’s really easy for a very complicated game to have bugs in it! Hopefully I’ll have also made a start on the roadmap features too though. See you next month!