The Astro Prospector Timeline (in realtime!) - Part 1

A few weeks ago, LocalThunk, the creator of Balatro, launched a blog. One of his first posts was The Balatro Timeline, an incredible summary about the development of Balatro, laid out chronologically from its beginnings to its release.

That blog post made me feel things. Despite all the cultural distance (LocalThunk has probably never even heard of salmorejo) and professional distance (I wish I could design a game as good as Balatro), the journey of indie game development from LocalThunk’s perspective felt VERY familiar. A rollercoaster of stress, satisfaction, obsession, fulfillment, and occasional health issues.

For a few months now, I had been toying with the idea of writing posts on a personal blog. Reading LocalThunk’s experience pushed me from “thinking about it” to actually doing it. If I felt so much connection and empathy reading his story, then I guess someone out there could feel the same reading mine.

Astro Prospecwhat?

To give a bit of context, since January 2025 I have been working on Astro Prospector with two (and later three) teammates. It is an incremental bullet hell, inspired by recent titles like Nodebuster and Digseum. A little game with a six-month scope, aimed at a very specific niche.

Summing it up a bit:

• In terms of lore: there is an evil company called SpaceCorp that has monopolized all the AstroCoffee in the universe. AstroCoffee is the coffee of the future, extracted from cofferoids, and it is unbelievably good. So, the protagonist of our game, being a good, socially-conscious (and slightly addicted) citizen of the future, embarks on an epic journey to destroy SpaceCorp and return free AstroCoffee to humanity.

• In terms of gameplay: move, pew pew, collect coffee beans, whoooosh, shoot, bang bang, buy upgrades, booooom, become a space god, repeat. Dopamine straight to the brain.

Astro Prospector Screenshot

This is my second commercial, self-published, team-made project. The first one was Stick to the Plan. And the idea with this posts is to document the development, in real time, from when we started to when we publish it.

Buckle up, it’s going to be a ride.

Failure: November 2024 - December 2024

In November 2024, I got fired 🔥. Me and the entire team at the studio where I was working, Under the Bed Games. Working on indie gamedev is wonderful, you see. The company ran out of money to continue the project and had no choice but to let us go.

Oh, you thought this was the failure I meant? Nah, this was just the kickstart. Working at Under the Bed, I met a lot of amazing people (actually, everyone was amazing), including Raúl López ‘Lindryn’ and Álvaro Roldán ‘Sienfails’, my current teammates on Astro Prospector.

The last few weeks at Under were a bit strange. There wasn’t much work left for the dev team, which was just Raúl and me, so we decided to make a small prototype to practice MVP pattern, TDD, conventional commits, pair programming, and other software black magic. That prototype turned into a funny little concept, a factory game where everything flies through the air. You can check out a gif of the very first prototype here.

First Flying Rocks Prototype. Thanks for the assets, Kenney!

When we got fired, we decided to keep going with that idea and publish a small demo on itch.io. Nothing fancy, just a mini-game with a few levels, to practice, add to our portfolio, and stay sharp until we found new jobs.

And for a while, that’s exactly what we did. We kept working on it for a few weeks until a fellow dev I knew, who worked in publishing, crossed paths with us. Long story short, an opportunity came up to pitch the prototype as a full-time paid project to a new publisher who was coming to do things right.

Time was a bit against us (or so we believed), and we had to get the pitch ready as fast as possible. This was when we brought Álvaro on board to handle art, UI, and anything else that came up. Even though he was still pretty young in the game industry, he had already proven to be extremely talented and learned faster than anyone I’ve ever seen. So we slapped together a scrappy but effective pitch in three days, and off we went.

Concept Mockup for Flying Rocks

The pitch went really well. A medieval-themed, goofy factory game with a unique twist. No conveyor belts like Factorio or Satisfactory. Everything was thrown through the air between creatures, opening up new mechanics and situations within the genre. What a win. The publisher told us he was ready to sign right then and there, that we just had to send over budget and timeline details.

We prepared all the documents quickly. There was a huge rush. We delivered everything. Perfect. They were on board. They were already preparing the contract and, meanwhile, asked for a small core prototype to get a better sense of the idea. Fair enough. We had something halfway done already, so we pushed hard to get it ready.

We finished a first prototype in 2D. The final game was meant to be 3D, but this demo was just to show off the mechanics, not the art style. Good enough, they told us. Good enough 😀

I’ll cut to the chase because you can probably guess what happened. The process dragged on. The prototype was good, “but”. We had the first draft of the contract in hand. The second prototype was good, “but”. We kept working for two more months with the promise that the deal was just around the corner. In the end, they said, “the investors aren’t fully convinced yet, keep working until they are.”

Last 3D prototype of Flying Rocks

We couldn’t keep working forever based on promises that never materialized, so we decided to walk away from the project. And this was the failure. A few months working over a promise, not a contract. Working for the possible future, not for the real present. It wasn’t a personal failure, it wasn’t because we did things wrong. Neither did they, I guess. It wasn’t a bad failure. It was a good failure, one where you learn from. A bullet dodged that opened our eyes and gave us the determination to make a good game without needing a publisher to hold our hand.

What happened next?

After we canceled the project, I took a few days to reflect. Influenced by some Scientia Ludos videos, I decided that I was going to release a game in 2025. Self-published. And that it was going to go well without needing a standard publisher. Simplifying things a bit, what matters is that your game is good and that you know how to reach players. Make a game people want to play. That’s the mantra I repeat myself from now on.

In the next part, I’ll talk about how the idea for Astro Prospector came about, how we planned the project, what went well, and what didn’t in the first month.

See you next time! 👋

Bonus!

The latest prototype of Flying Rocks is still online on itch.io. If you are curious, you can try it entering here and using the password rocky dwarf.

Have fun!