Digger
· ai, projects, game, godot, claude, development
I wanted something running along the bottom of my screen while I work. Not a game that needs me, just one that is nice to glance at. So Digger is a mine in a strip: you mark the rock you want gone, and a little miner in a cowboy hat digs it out, hanging lanterns along the way. Ore rides the lift to the surface, where the foreman's tasks turn it into coins and XP for better picks, machines and helper robots. Every few levels a shaft opens to a deeper floor, and the floors never end.
On my PC it is a window glued to the bottom of the screen, always on top, and it can turn see-through so clicks go to whatever is behind it. Here the post plays the strip's part, and it works on a phone too. It's one of my small AI-made games; how they're all made is in Making small games with AI.
Play it
▶ Digger — a browser game, playable on the post's page.
On a computer, drag over rock with the left mouse button to mark it and with the right button to unmark it. The wheel zooms, and the middle button, WASD or the arrow keys move the view. 1–5 pick a floor, F follows the miner, B opens the Shop and Esc closes a panel.
On a phone, turn it sideways. Drag a finger over rock to mark it, or tap one block. Tap Erase, then drag, to unmark. Two fingers move the view and a pinch zooms.
It's about 24 MB to download. Your mine is kept on this page, in this browser, so you can come back to it later. It only digs while the game is open.
What's in it
- Floors of 96×64 blocks. Five are designed (Topsoil, Stone Halls, Red Deep, Basalt Vaults and Obsidian Heart), and after them the deep floors never end
- Five kinds of rock from dirt to obsidian, and nine ores and gems from coal to diamond
- A smelter, a gem cutter, storage crates, carts on rails and up to five helper robots
- Picks and drills from a copper pick to diamond drills, and 11 upgrades with no top level
- The foreman's task board, levels, cave sounds and music
How it was made
The first playable version took an evening. After that came six polish rounds, a round for the look of the mine, and a round where I picked between three designs for the buttons and panels (I went with wood and a serif font). The art comes from Synty, ZugZug and Gamemaster packs I already owned. A script pulls it out of my asset library, so none of it is stored with the game's code.
It tests itself like the others, but the bot matters most here. It plays from a new game and must reach the third floor, and its miners may never stand idle while there is marked rock they can reach. So when a change makes the mine impossible to progress, a test goes red. There is also a check over the whole economy: every pick can be paid for with what the pick before it can dig, every machine step is worth more than what goes into it, and nothing needs itself to be made. Each polish round has its own test that checks every pick from that round, and two runs with the same seed must end the same. All of it is 25 runs with 679 checks, and it takes about six minutes, four runs at a time.
For this page it got touch controls, a layout for phone screens, and saves that go through the page. Those have tests too: touch on four screen shapes, the page refusing or failing to give the save back, and a busy scene compared between the browser and the desktop build.
Hit me up if you find a bug, or if you dig deeper than floor 10.