Early Access Announcement Trailer

BIG NEWS!

Ship Miner will be released in Early Access in November!!

The game is currently part of the official selection of the LAGS Summer Game Fest Edition in Steam and the announcement happened during the festival presentation yesterday.

Why Early Access? And why November?

One factor is that I feel like having a deadline will help me to put restrictions in what I should do or not, right now sometimes I feel like I can continue forever adding new features. I also feel it could help me validate the market interest and find the right price of the game for the complete game launch. And last but not least, is that I feel the game could benefit from the pressure of being in early access, releasing frequent updates, interact and iterate with the community and use the feedback to complete the game (this is feeling driven development ).

It is going to be in November because I wanted it to be this year, I needed it to be after a Steam Next Fest (the next one is October), and December is a complicated month in real life (it will be a complicated month in gamedev life too with fixes, adjustments, community interaction). I also feel the game can get in a good state by that time.

Steam Events

Following How to market a Game Chris Zukowski and other developers’ advice, this year I decided to try to participate in as many steam festivals as possible. At the same time, I wanted to use those festivals as moments to announce important dates to get more attention and to have more chances to participate in the event since some of them give priority to new announcements.

For example, last year I released the Demo but didn’t want to announce it too loud because it wasn’t super ready, the objective was starting having more people playing the game. But for that reason, I never announced it properly and lost an opportunity. If I could travel back in time I would continue working with the private playtest until the Demo was in a state I was ok doing a proper announcement.

The objective is to reach 10k wishlists for EA release and being in festivals is super important for that.

In February, I participated in the Tiny Roguelikes 2026 Event and that went really well, considering the game was in the category with most games (action roguelikes) it got ~650 wishlists which was like 1/6 of my total wishlists at that time. I didn’t have to do extra work for that festival, I just submitted the game and was lucky to be selected.

Thanks Tiny Roguelikes!

I submitted the game for other events too, some of them rejected it and I am still waiting for a response of some others.

For the EA announcement I decided to do it during the LAGS festival and I was lucky they selected the game. In order to participate had to do this exclusive trailer with the announcement and for that reason I had to work really hard by recording and editing hundreds of videos, work on marketing tools inside the game and also learn Davinci Resolve. I would love to talk more about that process in another blogpost since I am really happy and proud of the result. Btw, the music by unf0ldmusic was 98% of the coolness of the trailer.

Lets see how it goes during the event in terms of wishlists but it started really really well, completely out of my expectations. I initially thought the festival was more a door for some streamer to get interested and make some content but just the festival is doing awesome. Here are some stats of the first day and a half:

Thanks Latin American Games Showcase!

Other Marketing Efforts

I had luck with an x/tweets post I did recently following the “This is the vibe I’m going for with my game” trend where I got around 200 wishlists. If I compare the wishlists against the ones from being in festivals, it feels like the value of doing marketing in social networks is lower but I believe it still makes sense since most of the time is not a big effort (could be share some gif or follow some trend), they could affect being considered in festivals or getting the interest of content creators and they also allow me to engage more directly with the community. In fact I got great contacts from twitter and reddit so they have more broad value than just convert to wishlists (same for festivals btw, the value is not just wishlists).

X/Twitter the vibe of my game trend!

In reddit I got a really good response from people in the r/IndieDev, here are the stats:

X/Twitter the vibe of my game trend!

What’s next

Hope you enjoyed the update, and I hope this goes well and not that I digged my own grave xD

In will try to do a blogpost about the roadmap to Early Access and the search for publishers for funding and marketing help (including my trip to Sao Paulo, Brazil for Gamescom Latam 2026).

That’s all, thanks for reading!

Remember to try the Demo and Wishlist!