Welcome to AstroMiner! Back in 2010, I wanted to make a 2d Minecraftish game that was set in space. I wanted you to be a miner heading out to an asteroid field when your ship crashes and you’re forced to figure out how to get back home. Here’s a trailer I made in 2011:
I wrote it in XNA and got pretty far back then, but a few things caused me to pause development. First, I wanted to add multiplayer and realized that I should’ve done that early on. XNA was fun to code in, but it wasn’t a full up gaming engine and required me to do most of the code. Also, because I started multiplayer late in development, the amount of work required was a pretty significant rewrite. I had started laying out what that should be when I got another punch: Microsoft was no longer supporting XNA. Between those two things, plus the fact that I had a kid on the way, AstroMiner development was paused for a while.
Fast forward a few years and I get the itch to write another game. I start researching game engines and come across the usual suspects, but one stuck out in particular: Godot. The editor worked well, the engine was fast, and best of all, I could code in c# (one of my favorite languages). I started working on a game called Raccoon Racing League. I had always wanted a one-finger racing game and RRL would be it. As I progressed along, I kept thinking about AstroMiner and how I wish I’d finished it. I thought about how Godot makes things really simple and how I could knock it out pretty quickly.
I was coding multiplayer into RRL one Saturday afternoon, realizing how simple it is to do it with Godot, when I thought about the struggle-bus I was on with AstroMiner multi-player. One thing led to another and after a few hours, I had a my first prototype of AstroMiner in Godot.
It’s been awesome rebuilding this game in a modern engine. AstroMiner 2023 already has more features than AstroMiner 2011 and it continues to grow. I have an official Steam page now and am hoping to release the first version of the game in late 2023. I’ve been doing a lot of testing over the last month and would love to release it sooner, but I want to make sure I have something playable and fun.
