Can You Mine the Fastest?
You’re an Astro-Miner. Your objective: blast your way through an asteroid to collect valuable minerals to send back to Earth. Be careful, though; not everyone you meet will be friendly!
The Facts Behind the Game
Asteroids are rocky bodies (not icy, like comets), often irregular (not round) in shape and many of which are thought to be the broken remnants of bodies that never grew big enough to be planets when the solar system first formed. There are many different groups of asteroids that orbit the Sun at various distances, but the most well known are those found in the main asteroid belt, between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.
Asteroids contain many minerals of value on Earth (e.g. gold, silver, platinum, iron, nickel, manganese, and more) as well as materials useful to astronauts in space, which makes them appealing targets for mining operations in the future.
Blast Off at Home!
The free, playable demo of Astro-Miners is available for Windows and Mac. Inspired by the ROM's own research and collections and informed by museum science, Astro-Miners is a 2D sandbox adventure that allows players to navigate the inside of three different types of asteroids in order to collect valuable resources, while also learning about rocks, minerals, and speace exploration. But watch out for robot miners and aliens along the way!
If you'd like to own the full 20-level version of Astro-Miners for PC or Mac, get it now (for $3.99 USD) at itch.io. A portion of each sale will support the ROM.
The ROM Connection
Dr. Kim Tait, Curator of Mineralogy in the Centre for Earth and Space at the ROM, is a participating scientist in the OSIRIS-REx mission. Scheduled to launch in September, 2016, its goal is to study and return a sample of asteroid 101955 Bennu in 2023.
What's a Game Jam?
At a ROM Game Jam, teams of developers spend a weekend at the ROM learning from collections and curators and using those ideas to build fun games inspired by the museum. With only two days to research and create their games, the results can be weird, wacky, and downright wonderful!
Astro-Miners was created by Pop Machine Creative Games.
Game Info
(Please note this game is only playable on a computer and is not optimized for mobile devices.)
# of players: 2
Controls: Keyboard
To play the free demo:
- Follow this link and choose the appropriate download.
- Extract the files to a folder on your computer
For Windows:
- Open the "Windows" folder
- Open "AstroMiners.exe"
For Mac:
- Open the "Mac" folder
- Open the "AstroMiner.app" folder
- Open the "Contents" folder
- Open the "MacOS" folder
- Open "My Game"
Screenshots:
