UnderMine Retrospective 2019

Hi everyone,

My name is Clint and in case you don’t know who I am, I am half of Thorium. The other half being my biz-partner, (and the original founder of Thorium) Derek. I’ve been thinking a lot about the past year. A lot has happened, and sometimes it feels like a lifetime has gone by, and sometimes just a week. So, if you don’t mind some sentimentality, and probably an overly long story, read on as we recap UnderMine and Thorium’s 2019. 

Before we get totally started I want to make sure we talk about our partners, because while we like how “a two man” team sounds, it’s not the whole truth. Derek and I do all of the development, as in, the design and programming, but we have quite a bit of help. First, there is James who is the current and primary artist on UnderMine. And we also have our friend Terry, aka Harlequin helping us with a lot of bug hunting, administration work, feedback, and other various things. And finally, Wes and Trevor of Sono Sanctus who do our music and audio. All-in-all it is still a pretty small team, but everyone is extremely passionate about delivering quality work. 

Okay, now we’re going to talk about 2019. Except… I want to start in 2018. Just over a year ago Derek and I were preparing for Dreamhack Atlanta, which was in November. This was probably our first real convention experience. We had done PAX West in August, but had only shown in the Indie Megabooth’s Minibooth (confusing, I know!) Minibooth is pretty much a kiosk where everything is provided and you only show for two days. If you are brand new to convention life you should start here! It was a great warm up. Atlanta was an entirely new beast since we had to furnish an entire booth ourselves. It was pretty sparse, and we only had one display, but it worked out. While the indie game scene at Dreamhack is pretty minor, I still look back on this show with a lot of fondness. I think this is where we started truly developing a community, albeit a small one. I think Discord membership was around 30-40 after this show? As for UnderMine, well… it had barely just started to come together at this show. We had the Mines complete, and maybe 50% of the Dungeon if we are being generous. Progression was still janky, and a couple skilled players really went off the rails with the power they obtained. The blessing and curse system was also still the prayer system which was not working out. 

The prayer system still used altars, but instead of praying for a blessing you wanted and getting a random curse in return, you prayed for a prayer (obviously.) Prayers had one specific benefit (a blessing,) and one downside (a curse.) It doesn’t seem like a big distinction to what exists now, but there were clear winners, and it also put a huge burden on design to figure out interesting trade offs. Long story short, the system we have now is much better and has been received really well by the community. 

With Dreamhack behind us we put our heads down and really hit our development stride. All while nervously waiting to see if we had gotten into all the other conventions we had applied for. Dates went by, and we remained nervous that we had been silently rejected. Everytime Derek and I had a final conversation about whether we had made it or not, we would receive the acceptance email. A fun tradition that happened more than a couple times. Turns out we were accepted to everything we applied for, which set us up for a whirlwind spring and summer. 

GDC and PAX East were next. At GDC we showed with Microsoft (since we are a game coming to Game Pass.) This was a great opportunity to show to some press and a good opportunity to practice selling UnderMine and its core features. Also in San Francisco, we did The Mix which was a great opportunity to chat with some fellow developers and publishers. It’s really crazy how over the last year we went from total nobodies, to being able to say we make UnderMine and people knowing what that meant. The game at this point was starting to look a lot more polished and the balance had been fixed for the most part. Jan-Mar was a monumental effort to get the game in fighting shape because we wanted to launch in summer, and we had a lot of conventions to attend. My biggest worry was always that we would release to crickets and no one would pay attention. I think great games often can go unnoticed, and nothing is a guarantee. We were always (sometimes) confident in the quality of the game, but whether any one would notice was always weighing on our minds. 

PAX East was the first convention where maybe a couple of players had heard of us? We had done a couple of conventions and gotten a tiny bit of media coverage. Some buzz was starting to take hold… We showed with Indie Megabooth again, which is an organization we absolutely adore. They are incredibly organized and supportive. We upped our booth game from Dreamhack. We had learned a few things. Overall, a pretty enjoyable show. Discord check: maybe 300 people at this point? And then there was E3…

So, excuse me while I get a bit personal because this was a pretty big deal for me. I’ve been working in the industry for just over 14 years now. Before that I went to school to make games. E3 was always something I wanted to attend. Everyone who is somebody in the games industry attends E3, and while it has lost a bit of its luster over the last couple of years, I still wanted to fulfill this dream. Microsoft emailed us and asked us if we would like to show with them at E3, and this was the easiest decision we had made all year. At GDC we made some good friends and they hooked us up big time. Not only did we attend E3, but they asked us if we could provide video to be included in their keynote presentation. What!? Our little, pet indie game is going to be shown alongside Halo and fucking Cyberpunk? For many, the highlight of that show was Keanu, but for us it was the 3 glorious seconds of UnderMine footage pumped out to millions of viewers. 

Probably one of the things we struggled with the most around this time was swinging widely between thinking the game was great and that people would love it, to the game being garbage, and focusing intensely on what we thought were the drawbacks. Honestly it doesn’t matter how many times other people compliment your work, you still struggle with whether they are just being nice or not. Maybe not everyone has this struggle, but it contributes to more and more stress as release approaches. Which brings us to…

Release! Between June and August we were working a lot of hours. I have to give Derek props, he works a lot harder than I do. On average I was probably doing 10-12 hours, and he was often doing 14. We would play games to relax in the evening, and I would logoff to go to bed, and he’d go back to work. And before the big, “you shouldn’t have to work that many hours” conversation comes up. We would never force anyone else to match that. We certainly don’t expect our partners to work extra hours. For us though, this was our shot. Our shot to not have to work for anyone else, and the thought of leaving any gas in the tank was unacceptable. It’s the kind of thing we would regret for the rest of our lives. 

So up until this point I haven’t mentioned our publisher Fandom. To be honest, they weren’t part of the picture for most of this time. We met them at PAX East, and we struck a deal maybe around June? I can’t remember now. But it was pretty short before EA launch, which they helped with big-time. I am not sure where we would be if launch had gone differently. We had a pretty big presence on Twitch for the first couple of weeks, kickstarted by Fandom’s efforts. And I think word just spread organically, which was the plan all along, but also a pretty big hail mary. Reviews were a bit rough to start. We teetered on the border of Mostly Positive and Very Positive (80%) It wasn’t a super comfortable place to be. As we sorted out some bug and balance problems though, reviews improved a lot. August was a hell of a month though, and incredibly exciting. The stress of if people would care, was washed away for the most part. We weren’t an instant success, but we weren’t failing either. Discord exploded with new players (discord check is probably at 1K now.) And overall it was incredible to watch people enjoy the game. Finally, UnderMine was more than a possibility, it was a reality. 

From here I am going to skip forward rather quickly because this is getting long, and most of this is rather public. We dropped around 14 or 15 updates between August and December, 3 of those being updates large enough we felt we could name them. The game has steadily increased in popularity through organic growth. And to be honest, we feel extremely grateful and humbled by the success of UnderMine. But, this is only the beginning, and we have not grown even a little complacent. Probably the opposite…

We honestly have a list of things we want to add to this game that goes way beyond the amount of time we have to implement it all. We have no intention of growing though, so that just means the best of the best is going to go in. As a sneak peek into next year, let me tease a couple of the features coming down the pipe. First, we have the female peasant, which was something we had promised for the last update, but was pushed due to time constraints. As of right now, she is the highest priority, since we don’t like missing deliverables. Further down the line we want to introduce a new mode that will challenge players in creative ways, and maybe some extreme ways too. And probably the most ambitious thing we want to add is an endlessly repeatable mode that pushes strategy to new levels. These things will all be coming in 2020 alongside a lot of other great stuff. I hope you’re looking forward to it.

To close this out, Derek and I both want to say a big thank you to our players. It’s because of your support that we can continue building UnderMine, and fulfilling its true potential. Sometimes it is easy to let the stress take over and forget that you are actually working your dream job, but at times like these we sit back and reflect on how lucky we are that we get to do this. 

Cheers to UnderMine, cheers to our fans, and cheers to all the rad shit coming in 2020.

See you there,

Clint (and Derek, and James, and Terry, and Wes, and Trevor, and Fandom too.)