Molehill Mountain

Many of you may be familiar with the Namco classic arcade game "Dig Dug" but were you aware that it was so successful that it spawned a mini-genre-fad of many other digging games or "Dig Dug clones"? Most of these were direct clones of the original for home computers and other competing video game systems, but Kazutoshi Ueda, working then for Japanese arcade giant Universal, made quite an impressive variant of the core concept.

The game was called Mr. Do! and while it's not as well remembered, its complex combination of multiple competing player goals, fast paced decision making, and much more pleasingly interactive obstacles and weaponry actually make for a superior design in many ways.

Kazutoshi would go on to design and/or direct many other great games such as Bomb Jack for the arcade, Dungeon Explorer for the PC Engine/TurboGrafx-16, and he even worked on the Megami Tensei series among many other projects over his career.

But his great work on this early game tickled my game designer neurons. Mr. Do opened up so many new possibilities for the basic grid-based, digging game concept. Unfortunately, like so many of these early arcade coin-gobblers, its goal was to be a fast, simple game loop that provided enough agency and complexity that players would come back for more but that would kill off inexperienced players fast enough that potential coins from other patrons weren't lost due to long wait times to get your turn at the machine. The nature of this monetization reality colors Mr. Do's mechanics and design in a way that makes the game feel a bit too demanding and exploitive of the player for our more modern, home console playing tastes. 

But it did get me thinking, could this "unfairly" hard nature of the design be tuned down a to be a bit more pleasing and could the impossible challenge, high score bragging rights nature of the game be altered to fit a more modern roguelike structure? After all, exploring the world beneath the earth by digging in the ground is not unlike exploring the hidden tunnels of long forgotten dungeons. I love Mr. Do's elegant mechanics, but once you have reached all 10 of it's levels, the game just repeats them from the start. Wouldn't it be a but more interesting if new, unpredictable levels lay beneath the dirt? What if new mechanics, enemies, weapons, perhaps even new friends could be found as a reward for our continued digging?

I had to find out.

And so I have set out to create a more detailed, more tantalizingly varied subterranean adventure for all of us to partake in. It is to be a game that discards the demanding difficulty of those early coin-operated amusements, but that keeps their charming inventiveness and tasteful simplicity. Imagine if a slightly more narrative, more mechanically dense digging game like this had been made, could digging games have become the dominant early console genre instead of Donkey Kong's distinguished line of platform hopping progeny?

Who is to say?

But let's imagine that different history, where Namco, not Nintendo had made that early leap from the static one screen game, to the world of possibilities that could be found by just imagining what could lie on the next screen over, or perhaps the next tunnel down. Let us enter The Molehill Mountain.

PLEASE NOTE!

I have just begun development on this game, it is no where near done or even what I would consider playable right now. Most features are not present yet and those that are are mostly in a preliminary, unfinished state. But feel free to play around with what I have prototyped so far.

CONTROLS:

Z - start and slingshot
X - chain dasher
ESC - quit