King under the Mountain released as open-source, Mountaincore dev on hold — Mountaincore News

2023 was a tumultuous year for Mountaincore - we were made to keep the community in the dark by a publisher which ultimately backed out, scrambled to release the game according to the plan that had been put in place, and ultimately it suffered as a commercial failure.

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!

This announcement was written and published by the developers/publisher of Mountaincore on Steam; it is mirrored here unedited for readability, with full credit and a link to the original above. © the respective rights holders. Rights holder and want it removed? Email us — we take it down promptly.