King under the Mountain
King under the Mountain released as open-source, Mountaincore dev on hold
The Mountaincore launch was way below what was required to keep even a single dev employed working on the game, so eventually all staff were laid off and it was forced to revert to being a free-time hobby project. This hasn't really worked out and the game hasn't seen any updates since that launch period, and I deeply apologise for that.
In addition, the company (Rocket Jump Technology) has had to be declared insolvent as the small amount of revenue from Mountaincore was not enough to cover even the small debts the company owed (themselves just a tiny fraction of the publisher-funded development budget). This means that Rocket Jump Technology is no more, and with it, there's very little chance of Mountaincore continuing to receive focused development.
That said, it is not entirely bad news. While the legal ownership of Mountaincore itself is still unclear due to the significant investment by the publisher, Rocket Jump Technology still owned all the rights to its preceding form, King under the Mountain, and this has now been made freely available as an (MIT-licensed) open-source project at https://github.com/rossturner/king-under-the-mountain
The MIT license is extremely permissive, essentially allowing you to do whatever you like with the contents, including using it for commercial purposes. The hope is that perhaps people will choose to continue developing the game as a community project, or failing that perhaps it will be useful to other developers (aspiring or not) to build something out of into another game.
Again I can only apologise for ending up in this situation, I didn't want this to happen as much as any of you. I've been working on King under the Mountain and Mountaincore since 2015, making it the most significant project I'll probably ever get to work on. Generally the community and response has been absolutely fantastic and I couldn't have hoped for that. Hopefully this isn't the end of Mountaincore entirely, but I don't foresee any updates in the near future, so it was important to set this expectation. Maybe I'll see you in the king-under-the-moutain github repo!
Mountaincore Early Access Release!
As an owner of King under the Mountain you should now have Mountaincore automatically in your steam library. This is a huge update compared to the most recent version of KutM so I highly recommend that you check it out - doing so will be a boost to the game's success as well if we can hit a good player count on launch day!
With this update, King under the Mountain is fully retired and all future news and updates will be on the Mountaincore page. Thank you so much for joining us on the journey so far, and now onto the next big step!
Mountaincore granted to all King under the Mountain owners
If you haven't already, I recommend joining the Discord server to get involved with the community. We're very actively resolving bugs and taking in feedback. We'll shortly be releasing the Roadmap for Mountaincore, though it probably won't look too different to what you were expecting for King under the Mountain.
As ever, thank you for your support and joining us on the journey with this game!
What's Next for 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 publisher’s 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, we’ve 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, it’s still a very good outcome for everyone involved. We were left with essentially two choices: release everything we’ve done as a big update for King under the Mountain, or proceed with the original plan of a relaunch under a new title. We’ve 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 we’ll 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. It’s 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 it’s 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 we’ve 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 publisher’s decision in the final week of March, so we’re still putting things in place to relaunch the game as Mountaincore – for example the game’s new logo is in progress but isn’t 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. There’s good news though, as we’ve been promising this update for quite some time, we can also provide pre-launch keys to owners of King under the Mountain immediately. If you’re 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 don’t like about the big changes (or anything else you’d like to see in the game!)
What’s 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 we’ve always seen as a key aspect of the game. We’ve 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 we’ll 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 I’m very happy to be going back to an open and transparent dev cycle.
Huge news on the future of King under the Mountain
Sorry it's been so quiet for so long with no news about what's happening with King under the Mountain. It's been brewing for a long time, but I'm absolutely delighted to announce that I'm now working with a publisher - one of the very best - to bring together a full-time dev team and be able to give this the attention and development budget it deserves.
Having not just myself but a small development team on the game full-time is going to make a world of difference compared to the effectively part-time hobby project it has been so far, and I can't wait to be able to share with you all what that looks like when the time comes. The bad news is this means we have to "go dark" again for a while until the team and I are ready to unveil major progress.
Thank you so much for your continued patience and support.