Diggerland

All that is required to play this game is a mouse. Further instructions are provided in the main menu.

Diggerland is the result of a private game jam which challenged myself and my friend James to create our own incremental game. 

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This took about a month and the assets were acquired from a variety of sources, which I would happily provide citations for, should that become necessary.

The premise of Diggerland takes inspiration from the real-life amusement park located in New Jersey, USA. Your goal is to dig through a grid of tiles representing terrain, upgrading your tools and purchasing items from the shop to aid your effort. 

There are four special gems to look out for, appropriately named Green, Purple, Red, and Orange. These can be used to complete quests, further expanding the gameplay with automated tools. 

This is maybe my 3rd or 4th time making a 3D game, and I'm proud of what I was able to accomplish here. 

My takeaway from the project is that for an "incremental game" to be appealing, it will establish multiple systems that must be simple and comprehensible on their own. Then, when those systems are integrated with one another, they reach a harmonious complexity which serves as the basis for the players enjoyment. 

In Diggerland, the main systems are: the digging gameplay, the shop system, the quest system, and the leveling system. Admittedly, there is room for expansion. Missing from this game is the theme of automation driving everything, a feature that is present in most others in this genre. In future updates, I would like to update some of these systems to align more with that theme.