Dig Deeper

Ava Arnett

This game was created as an 8-month-long team project made with at its peak 12 team members split between Design and Programming. I served as UX Lead, as well as a production-focused Design Lead.

Built in a custom engine built during-development by our Programmers, design working in a custom editor built off IMGUI.

Starting Point

The initial pitch for our project was a side-scrolling, digging-focused tower defense game where you drill for resources to power your machines, with enemies using the tunnels you dig as the route up towards your base in intermittent waves. Taking heavy inspiration from the movement of Dig Dug, as well as some elements of Dome Keeper.

Initial development considered a static perspective, akin to Dig Dug, in which the player would dig out from a baseline tunnel system and build turrets between traditional tower defense waves.

UI Baseline

With this starting point of what was expected set out, initial iteration began on a collapsible, but otherwise standard Tower Defense user interface.

The idea was to have your base health always visible between rounds at the top, along with a countdown to, then duration of the next/current wave hanging off of it. (Along with a wave tracker)

Design Pivot

Around 3 months into development, we added a full-time level designer to the team. This addition gave us greater bandwidth to create larger level spaces and progression to the game, and in-so doing, the game began to pivot into a larger exploration-focused game.

This pivot in design required a major retooling of the current UI systems. With spacious pre-made tunnels and routes to rare resources dotting the map, exploration and navigation made large bars more cumbersome for the player experience. Thus, pivots were made to shrink the overlays and minimize full-scale UI screen space.

Final Processes

In an effort to keep as much information conveyed as possible without traditional HUD elements after the design pivot earlier in the project, many elements of interaction were reworked into pop-ups and world elements.

This can be seen in the currency trackers that appear in the upper left corner whenever a resource is gathered, as well as the turret placement ranges visualized around each generator as a ring of particles.

The jump to more minimal UI did come with drawbacks however, previously visualized weapon stats were changed to instead be shown through gameplay alone, and the currency bar which would've shown when you can purchase items conveniently being only a pop-up takes away from the ability to reliably ration your resources in building up a base.