Gold Rush Ventures is a 2D sandbox game I began developing in March 2025. Set during the American Gold Rush era, you play as a miner exploring the underground in search of fortune. The project is inspired by an old mobile game I played as a kid called Tiny Miner.
Gold Rush Ventures is a passion project that’s still in active development. Take a look at the Steam Page if you are curious.
In 2024 I developed an early prototype and proof of concept for the game, which gave me strong motivation to begin full development. Despite its technical limitations, the prototype already captured the core feeling of exploration and risk, the main driving forces of the game.
However, coming from a mobile game development background, many features were not up to PC standards and felt overly influenced by mobile design. Most of these issues, particularly those related to UI, UX, and inventory management, have since been addressed in the new version of the game, along with the earlier technical limitations.
The core game design revolves around energy consumption and progressively harder depth biomes. Players must explore caves while carefully managing their energy to ensure they have enough to resurface in time. This constant tension keeps the player asking: ‘Do I risk it and keep mining for more?’
As the player digs deeper, the return trip to the surface grows longer, naturally creating a rising difficulty curve. To reach greater depths, players will eventually need to build infrastructure within the caves, establishing reliable paths that let them resurface quickly and avoid getting lost.
Built around this core loop are additional features designed to keep players engaged. These include exploring and discovering procedurally generated structures, leveling up NPCs, completing quests, and more.
Gold Rush Ventures is my first game published on Steam, though not my first project overall. With the experience gained from past developments and a clear vision of what makes a great game, I set out to go above and beyond with this one.
It is a single-player open-world sandbox where players have near-complete freedom to shape the world as they wish. To support long-term improvement, I’ve implemented analytics, remote configuration, and database integration, allowing me to collect valuable feedback and iterate on game balance and features.
Gold Rush Ventures is built on a strong technical foundation designed for both depth and performance. The world is procedurally generated with caves, ores, and biomes shaped by custom noise algorithms, while a chunk-based system streams areas in and out to support vast maps without memory issues.
A robust save/load system ensures player progress, inventories, and world changes persist seamlessly with future support for Steam cloud save.
Currently, the game does not include controller support, but this may be added later depending on public reception.
My goal is to build a community of players who are interested in the game and can help me shape it into the vision I have in mind.
At the time of writing, I’m still far from that goal, but there’s a long journey ahead. Achieving a fun and balanced experience requires many iterations and thorough testing.
Playtests will begin soon on Steam with a build stripped of some features, which I plan to add later if the game is well received.
Key systems still missing include fluid and gas simulations, maps, dynamic global events, and a wealth of content built on the existing foundations.
I have high hopes for this project and firmly believe it has the potential to become a truly great experience.
I’ve chosen the path of self-publishing to ensure the game fully reflects my vision, while staying true to my values regarding fair monetization.
