Mountaincore is now free to play on Steam, and also open-sourced under the permissive MIT license at Github[github.com]!

Two years ago, we were working with a publisher who were on-board to fund and market what became Mountaincore, but unfortunately they decided not to go ahead with publishing the game (as was their right per the terms of the contract). That left Rocket Jump Technology in a bad position - we'd not been allowed to say what we were doing for the past year or what we were working on, so then when the publisher pulled out our only real option was to market the game ourselves over an extremely short period (we didn't have much money in the bank to continue otherwise) and hope that the Early Access launch was successful enough to fund further development of the game. It was not. This wasn't surprising as its next to impossible to get noticed as an unknown indie game studio unless your game is so incredible that it finds big success through word of mouth, which itself then leads to news sites picking it up, big streamers playing the game, etc. I'd say these make up about 0.01% of indie game releases, like Balatro or Vampire Survivors. Every developer wants to make the best game they can for people to enjoy it, but there's around 1000 games released on Steam every month so you have to be really special to stand out from that crowd.

I was really happy with how Mountaincore was shaping up, but right from the start it was clear that it was a bit too ambitious a game for a single developer's hobby project. The publisher funding allowed others to come on board, as you can see in the game's credits (and they're all fantastic people). I think if we'd been able to sell a modest amount of units from the Early Access launch, Mountaincore would have been able to stay in full time development and maybe today be approaching a more polished and final release. Sadly it wasn't to be, the developer (Rocket Jump Technology) was liquidated and the two remaining staff had to quickly find a new job, leaving no real time to continue development. This is the history of why development was abandoned, and I'm so, so sorry to those of you who purchased the game or backed the original King under the Mountain Kickstarter. I swore I'd keep working on this game even if I had to do it all myself in my free time, but life's circumstances changed and I no longer had that time available to dedicate.

This has been a long time coming because the legal ownership of Mountaincore is a little murky given that it was developed with a publisher's funding (on top of years of development of its previous incarnation as King under the Mountain) but its been two years now, Rocket Jump Technology no longer exists, I don't think anyone is going to be upset at making the game free and us giving back what we can by releasing it as open-source. The MIT license means you're allowed to copy what's there, change it, and even sell the result if you want to. It would be nice if it can live on in some way, but at the least maybe it will be useful to up and coming game developers to see a "full" modern game available like this. It was really bothering me that Mountaincore was still available to buy on Steam as Early Access when it won't be completed, so at least that is resolved now!