Dwarven Dig has a fun central fantasy. Digging through the hill, placing ladders, selling ore, and chasing better pickaxes reminds me a lot of classic Motherload-style mining games, and the mountain pixel backdrop gives the page a nice mood. Thorbjorn’s goal of earning 8,000 for the train home is a simple hook that works.
What I enjoyed most was the dig-and-return loop itself. Once you start carving shafts and deciding what to sell, the game becomes easy to keep poking at. The shop idea is also good in concept: ladders plus tiered pickaxes give the build a clear progression target.
A few concrete suggestions from my playthrough:
- Let Esc (or clicking outside) close the shop; relying only on E is easy to forget.
- Add a “sell all” option — selling resources one by one slows the loop down.
- Make pickaxe upgrades obviously different (mining speed, multi-tile dig, harder rock tiers, etc.). Right now everything feels one-hit, so upgrades are hard to evaluate.
- Add an escape/return option if the player digs too deep without ladders — getting soft-locked under the surface is frustrating.
- Sound and music would help a lot; the current silence makes the mine feel unfinished.
- Slightly clearer UI fonts/tooltips would help new players understand prices and material requirements faster.
Overall, this is a charming mining prototype with a strong genre feel. With clearer upgrade feedback, safer recovery from deep digs, and audio, it could become a really satisfying little digger. Great work to DanyErm, Duke Blimpton, and DANYMA!
Thank you for such long review and the whole video. Yeah, I just wanted to implement this idea even though it barely fits "Mountain" theme. To the time MicroJam has ended this game was even less completed, so to do this we participated in one more GameJam whose assets we used (not background only but character as well, I just didn't know how to send there more than one link).
Thank you for some advises. Maybe I will do some improvements someday, I'm not sure.
No, blocks that appear on ladders or not appear where they suppose isn't feature, it's a bug. If I fix the game one day I will comletely rework digging system because of how bad it works. And I forgot to inform players that there's "Return to Surface" button that can help if they're stuck. However it would remove all of their items. This one was intended this way.
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Dwarven Dig has a fun central fantasy. Digging through the hill, placing ladders, selling ore, and chasing better pickaxes reminds me a lot of classic Motherload-style mining games, and the mountain pixel backdrop gives the page a nice mood. Thorbjorn’s goal of earning 8,000 for the train home is a simple hook that works.
What I enjoyed most was the dig-and-return loop itself. Once you start carving shafts and deciding what to sell, the game becomes easy to keep poking at. The shop idea is also good in concept: ladders plus tiered pickaxes give the build a clear progression target.
A few concrete suggestions from my playthrough:
- Let Esc (or clicking outside) close the shop; relying only on E is easy to forget.
- Add a “sell all” option — selling resources one by one slows the loop down.
- Make pickaxe upgrades obviously different (mining speed, multi-tile dig, harder rock tiers, etc.). Right now everything feels one-hit, so upgrades are hard to evaluate.
- Add an escape/return option if the player digs too deep without ladders — getting soft-locked under the surface is frustrating.
- Sound and music would help a lot; the current silence makes the mine feel unfinished.
- Slightly clearer UI fonts/tooltips would help new players understand prices and material requirements faster.
Overall, this is a charming mining prototype with a strong genre feel. With clearer upgrade feedback, safer recovery from deep digs, and audio, it could become a really satisfying little digger. Great work to DanyErm, Duke Blimpton, and DANYMA!
Thank you for such long review and the whole video. Yeah, I just wanted to implement this idea even though it barely fits "Mountain" theme. To the time MicroJam has ended this game was even less completed, so to do this we participated in one more GameJam whose assets we used (not background only but character as well, I just didn't know how to send there more than one link).
Thank you for some advises. Maybe I will do some improvements someday, I'm not sure.
No, blocks that appear on ladders or not appear where they suppose isn't feature, it's a bug. If I fix the game one day I will comletely rework digging system because of how bad it works.
And I forgot to inform players that there's "Return to Surface" button that can help if they're stuck. However it would remove all of their items. This one was intended this way.