dig!!!!!!

dig!!!!!! is an indirect control strategy game developed by Aaden over the course of a month for the Glombtacular Game Jam of 2026. Taking inspiration from Achikaps and loosely from EDGE by Mobigame, the player is tasked with managing a mining facility located in a cave filled with various resources and magical gemstones, trying to both keep the population alive and make money to further expand the facility. The game would face issues post the deadline and would score fifth out of seventh overall.

Development

A majority of the development process was shared on Aaden's Tumblr blog, though videos were also crossposted to @aadenmisc on YouTube.

Following a recurring pattern of "reinventing the wheel" for every game jam, Aaden started development on the game by attempting to create a system which would create circular depressions out of an arbitrary polygon, additionally creating islands where necessary. This system would be finished a day later, but bugs would continue to appear after the fact and would not be fixed to an acceptable degree until near the end of the game jam. Aaden would create a new post three days later showing the start of the facility and the dual pathfinding/digging system used by the miners, and it would be this autonomous behavior that would reveal several problems with the digging function, as the cave would repeatedly turn itself inside out. The next day, he would return with a new video showing the fixed system, alongside optimizations to the miners' pathfinding, followed by the collectors (getting their own video) and gemstones being implemented two then three days later, respectively. The game and its corresponding video would finally be completed 55 minutes before the deadline, but bugs were present that would prove to make the game unplayable.

Gameplay

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The goal of the game is to keep a mining facility running as long as possible. You start with a balance of 100 dollars, of which must first be spent on one of three types of workers: miners, which exit the facility to dig into the cave and return materials they retrieve; collectors, which work in and out of the facility to organize materials into their respective places; and builders, which are responsible for the construction of items and new rooms in the facility. Each facility has a material cost for creating and upgrading them.

Gemstones can be encountered by miners when digging into the cave, with their potency being derived from their weight. Carrying or being in close proximity to a gemstone will cause a worker to become exposed over time and lose some health. Once a worker has been fully exposed, their capabilities are radically affected, benefiting some skills and reducing others, while they slowly lose health over time until they inevitably die. If all workers die, the game is irreversibly lost.

See also

• Maze Survival