[SAD] Mobile Digging

For this game jam, my main goal is to make a game that is natively mobile. So, not a web game that happens to be playable on mobile devices, but an actual android/iOS (but not really) app. What this means is that I probably want to use some library to abstract away annoying packaging details with making an app for any platform; I also didn't want to use any tools that would put me under restrictive licenses in case I wanted to actually release (or polish, and then release) my game.



I decided on using libGDX, which seems like a pretty decent library, and though it means writing in Java, which I haven't done for a while, hopefully things will go well.

As I am going to be learning my tools on the fly during this jam, I don't want to make something that is too complicated, though I want to make something with the potential to actually be a fun mobile game.

I am taking my primary inspiration from a fairly obscure game that I have never played called "Mr Driller"

The goal is to continuously dig downwards: this is complicated by the fact that you have a certain limited amount of air to breath, and you die if you run out of air, and as you can see in the above image, colored sections that you dig come in various sizes, so the strategy comes in picking how to dig downwards in order to maximize your rate of descent, and thus total distance covered.

So, I plan on my game being very similar, with the goal being digging downwards as far as you can in an infinite descent, and running out of air eventually being the death condition, though there will be ways to regain air, and I plan on removing the colored puzzle blocks mechanic for more block complexity (blocks taking various amount of time to dig through, air-filled blocks, things like that).

I am hoping that I scoped this project reasonably enough that I will be able to finish before the end of the jam, and if I do manage to finish by the end of the jam, then I will also have succeeded in learning libGDX to a reasonable amount.