Ship Miner

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Latest news

• Announcements·8 Sept 2026Official

  Ship Miner is part of Prismatic 2026 Indie Showcase!

  Ship Miner is part of the Prismatic Indie Showcase 2026 edition and will also be part of October Steam Next Fest. I would've loved to have a demo update for the showcase but I couldn't since I am working super hard to for the next fest and the EA release. There is a Demo to play nonetheless and if you want you can join the private beta which is updated with more frequency.Thanks for reading!
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• Announcements·31 Aug 2026Official

  Ship Miner now supports multiple languages!

  Here is how the game could look in Japanese.Even though the game is not finished, and will change for sure, preparing the game to support different languages shouldn’t be the last thing to do.The objective for the last week was to technically prepare the game while also validate some UI changes I did a couple of months ago where I decided to change to use a pixelart font named Silver that supports characters from multiple languages. The texts for each language are stored in a language file and I used the typical "key"="value" format.Long story short, the results were really good, the font seems to support pretty well Japanese, Chinese, Korean and Russian. From the UI side, I had to adjust some UI text elements pivots/anchors so the texts are centered properly and the size of the containers but in general it was relatively easy (although it might require still more work I didn’t notice). I can say that the work I did on the UI some time ago to support the new font payed off now.After testing the game in other languages, maybe the only thing I might change are the ingame notifications which now look a bit too big considering the new font, maybe I change all notifications to be in HUD but I will wait to test it a bit more before deciding that.One thing that happened was that now that the game seems to easily support other languages, I want it to be released in as many as possible. But I can’t pay for all translations, so my current plan is to do the texts for both English and Spanish myself (might pay for proof reading) and pay for Japanese, Chinese and Russian translations. And for the future I might continue with Portuguese, Korean, German, French and Italian.I also made this easy to extend by the community since adding new languages is as easy as adding a text file in a runtime special folder and the game autodetects it and shows it in the language selection window. I would love for the community to add new language files, test them and if they are good and used by ...
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• Announcements·24 Aug 2026Official

  Making runs feel more different and indirect combat.

  While I am preparing the game for EA release, I am tackling some big issues and unknowns to then focus on adding more content and polishing the game. In this blogpost in particular I want to talk about making runs feel more different and changing the combat to be more indirect.One of the issues is that the game feels a bit repetitive in some decisions during the run. This doesn’t mean there are no interesting decisions, in fact, there are even lots of implicit decisions around the core gameplay but the explicit ones need more work. For example, which technology to install in the ship is a matter of randomness but you end up installing everything and it feels like there is no real decision there after playing multiple times.The other issue is that the game combat is too centered around the ship and it feels like it needs more combat oriented actions like dashing or blocking but that was never my intention since it is a “relaxing” mining game with combat, not a combat game with mining, so that’s not the direction I want for the solution.Current planned idea/solutionTo improve first issue the idea is to start digging deeper in the roguelike elements. This means having more optional unlocks during runs, probably when collecting blueprints or traveling to other asteroids. Those unlocks could be technologies, buildings, global upgrades, etc, but they will presented more in a roguelike way, where you have to select one of multiple choices, and they will unlock paths but might block others.For the other issue, the idea is to remove the ship as center of the combat by adding more automatic elements like buildings, drones and ships, each one with different attacks. Some of them could even be extensions of the main ship.Micro base buildingAs first step I decided to start by implementing indirect elements to build, the space stations.To build stations there are some invisible holders around other stations that become visible and interactable when the ship is near, and support d...
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• Announcements·15 Jul 2026Official

  Metagame and replayability with new Ships

  To prepare for EA release I started working on adding more replayability through metagame unlocks. Having different ships sounds like a reasonable first thing to have in a game named “Ship” Miner.In order to increase replayability, playing with a new ship should provide a different experience when playing the game again. That doesn't mean the core game should change but more like looking at the same game with different lenses.The approach I want is more like Dome Keeper or FTL where playing with unlocked content is optional and not like Wall World for example where you have to unlock metagame content in order to progress inside the game and in order to beat it.How to unlock the new ShipsMy plan for unlocking ships is to complete different objectives, could be complete the game, complete a specific achievement or complete missions inside the game (same asteroid or not).However, since I don't have support for that right now, I suppose I initially would unlock them by completing asteroids or the game itself, and once I start having more content then improve how/when to unlock it.First ships and thoughts on playingRight now I am working on a couple of ships that will be there for next playtest version.Dual Rays (or the one that is the same but not the same for now)One of them starts with double rays (now mining devices) and different initial stats, it is faster while not using the mining device but slower while using it and it is a bit more fragile.FastFragilePowerfulI didn’t play too much with this Ship but I liked the double ray on start, it feels more powerful, and I like it moves faster than the other one. I still don’t feel it so different than the main one but maybe it is ok since I needed a test of having a different “starting” values.However, I want to continue playing with its balance and with how the weapon behaves. I imagine one change could be that the rays do some attack pattern or increase a bit the speed penalty while using the mining device but make it r...
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• Announcements·1 Jul 2026Official

  Roadmap to Early Access and LAGS impact

  At the beginning of this month I announced Ship Miner Early access release date and I want to share what is the plan to get into it as well as what I am working right now.Before that though, I want to share some information about wishlists.LAGS + Early Access Announcement Participating in the LAGS Summer Game Fest Edition to announce the Early Access release date had a really positive impact in wishlists.Basically, the game duplicated wishlists during the event, which is nuts, and completely out of my expectations. I am really happy with this result and super grateful they selected Ship Miner. Here is the showcase presentation:Current wishlistsThe game has more than 8k wishlists in Steam and the objective is to reach 10k before the EA release in November. Right now, it feels like a reasonable objective considering there is still time and the game will participate in October's Steam Next Fest. I will also continue submitting Ship Miner to other fests so with some luck if they accept it, that will also help in reaching that objective. MarketingOne thing that happened recently, like 4 days ago, is that for some reason someone resurrected the "This is the vibe I’m going for with my game" trend quoting my tweet and that started to get some traction again, and the game got around ~80 new wishlists during that time. Not a huge deal in terms of numbers but the important thing here is I did nothing, it was just automatic marketing and it felt awesome. Roadmap to Early Access and Next Fest In general terms, I feel like the core mechanics: mining, exploring, upgrading feels pretty well while the combat needs more work. My idea is to get more depth in all aspects but the game will continue to be a mining game first. I visualize the new combat elements to be more indirect, maybe going more to a tower defense/rts kind of game, like you build drones to attack enemies and space stations to defend, and maybe you can install some technologies to be better in combat but right now I do...
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