The Great Underground
Platform: Android
The Great Forest Studio has dug up a cozy adventure RPG for you with plenty of resource mining and survival game elements! In The Great Underground you play a lone miner out to seek his fortune with just his knapsack, pick and a few provisions. Your digging skills improve with practice for each terrain type along with your ability to survey valuables within them at a distance. Retrieve them and sell them at the shop to earn money for better supplies as your skills improve! Different foods and teas each provide their own enhancements and you'll want to be sure to stop by the Inn to get the latest info and storyline plot points from the local villagers in this endearing game with soothing music and hand-painted graphics that's more about character development than utilitarian grinding. The Great Underground is free to play on your Android with hours of play and gorgeous artwork, and has a code available as a single in-app purchase which releases everything in the game, with more to discover and more storyline to encounter. This one is great for digging and exploring on your Android whether for short, relaxing adventures when you just have a few minutes to spare or for long, planned crawls to the depths where the greatest valuables can be found.
Choose where you'd like to dig by drawing a route outward from yourself. If you're playing on an Android smartphone rather than a tablet you may find that your route as registered wasn't quite what you'd had in mind, and you can undraw it in whole or in part by tracing back a bit — if you notice it before you've managed to dig through some terrain you'd rather you hadn't that is, which can be a bit hit-or-miss because you'll only spot it once you've finished drawing and cleared your hand out of the way. When you can afford it, sleeping gear of your own will save you quite a bit of time and money not only because you won't have to keep going up to the Inn to rest, but also because improved sleeping gear allows you to get the same rest and recovery in less time. And since hunger is time-based, this also enables you to reduce your food budget. With less expenses you can afford more efficient tools sooner, and you can even leave caches of provisions or gleaned valuables in cloth bags along a route for deeper and more profitable subterranean delving. The Great Underground starts you off right with a smooth in-game tutorial to show you everything you'll need to play, and features a delightfully soothing ambient environment you'll feel comfortable in planning underground excursions great or small, any time of day.
The Great Underground (Android, Android Tablet)
Sounds amazing but I dont have an android device--any info on whether there are any plans to release to other platforms?
I have a smaller tablet so I also noticed that I had trouble with getting my input recognized the way I intended it - my hand can be above the place where I want to mine, so as long as I keep my finger on the screen until I'm sure I don't have to re-drag the route I'm fine, but when the game thinks I wanted to mine when I was actually trying to pan the screen, there's trouble.
The other problem I had with this for the while I played it was that there's a very artificial-feeling step limit, so that even if you have a clear staircase path from the inn to the bottom of your mine, you're going to have to do it in several steps instead of one and pan the screen accordingly. I get that it's potentially a way to prevent players from heedlessly killing themselves by not noticing they're starving to death until halfway along their journey up from the center of the earth, but a) that's why saving exists, b) that won't actually stop players from doing things like that, and c) it's irritating from the very beginning when I'm nowhere near far enough away to kill myself from that unless I'm deliberately ignoring the warning.
Hello, developer here!
I'm planning to make the game available for desktops on Steam as soon as I can. I would love to make an iOS version as well, but there are technical complications, so that will have to wait longer.
Here is some help for dragging. Let me know if it makes things easier.
- To dig, start your motion from the miner or from the terrain right next to him,
- To pan the view, make sure that the motion doesn't start close to the miner.
As for the tap and walk limit, thanks! That's an awesome observation. I and my testers apparently all panned and walked in small screenfuls, so I never realised that you might want to pan all the way down and tap once to walk the whole way.
It's a cool idea and it would save a lot of unnecessary gestures. I'll look into implementing it. The only problem that might arise is that pathfinding such a huge terrain may be too slow on some devices. Nevertheless, I will be able to significantly increase the tapping distance.
Cheers,
Risto
One man team at The Great Forest Studio
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