Hello miners,
I’m still working on new things but I have not a lot to show right now. Most of the progress we made over the past week is still not ready to be shown. For this reason, I thought it could be a good opportunity to talk a bit more about how the project Hold The Mine started, the different gameplay I experimented with and how it became the game you’ll be able to play really really soon.
Where it all begin
Hold The Mine was at first a concept with a very big fantasy component: what if you play a group of dwarves digging in the mine during the day and defending it during the night? The first thing I ever drew for the game was this image, showing this group defending the entrance of a mine, a very easy to pick up concept.
My main inspiration for this game idea was not Dome Keeper back in the day, even if I believe it inspired me nonetheless. The idea came from a specific scene in the movie Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers where Gimli and Aragorn are holding an infinite group of Uruk-hai in front of Helm Deep key access.
That’s how this project started back in December 2023. No prototype, just this concept. It took me less than a month to prototype this image into Unity but it wasn’t that great. The game was just a clicker, and a terrible one. The battle aspect was not really the issue here; the mine gameplay (or lack of gameplay) was the reason I pivoted to different ideas.
Trouble in the Mine
This process took most of the first 12 months. One of those experiments was an incremental clicker version, similar to Minesweeper but the one that became the main focus was a version where you could mark blocks and dwarves try to dig those blocks.
The mining phase was in real time back then: the day was 120 seconds long and you could mark any block you want, the dwarves would automatically find the best way possible to reach and dig them.
The battle also changed during this period, but it was not really a gameplay rework, more like a new way to present things: enemies would not come from one side but from both sides, and the mine entrance would be at the center. That was a great change and made the battle more epic and dramatic. I also introduced spells the player could trigger to help the dwarf heroes holding the monsters during this phase.
Early 2024, the game evolved quickly. This is where I introduced the buildings: like now, you had to find blueprints down the mine and collect ressources to build them. This is also when I did some experimentation with the art direction.
I was still struggling with the visuals and the project was too big for me alone to handle. Two artists (Camille Coq & Jeanne Prigent) joined the project in September 2024 and it helped a lot shaping Hold The Mine visuals into the version you know today.
The jump in quality was insane, but the game was still in a messy place.
Inevitable Changes
The last part of 2024 was really hard for me. The mine gameplay had a lot of issues, and I did my best to try to find solutions that would make it much better to play.
Since the beginning of the project, I did a lot of playtesting. But whatever I tried with the mine, something was clearly not working with the gameplay. A radical change was inevitable to get me out of this: pivoting from real-time to turn-based digging gameplay…
This is only the first part of the story, but next week I’ll talk about what followed. 2025 was definitely the year Hold The Mine became really promising. Thanks for all the support and feedback!
Paci
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