Exactly a month ago, on September 20, the game had no name and no hero. There was a forest, there were caves under it, and there was a little cube hopping through them. Today the game has a three-story house, chests, neighbors, two lands, quests and a server of its own. We looked back through our notes for the month and decided to tell you how it all came together, in order.
September 20: a forest and a drill
It all started with the forest: hills, grass, trees, and under them earth, stone and caves. On the very first day the pickaxe gave way to the drill. It takes a moment to spin up and only bites into what's right next to you, but you feel every block in your hands. On the same day the torch became a real item: without one, the caves are dark.
The trees came alive on day one, too. A cut trunk settles as if on a spring, and if you drill right through it, the crown comes crashing down and breaks apart on the ground.
A hero in gloves
On day two the hero got a face and a personality. At first he was an egg: gloves, boots, big eyes and a somersault in every jump. A little later came the screen where you build the hero your way: name, colors, eyes, mouth, hair or a hat.
He stayed an egg until nearly the end of September. Then we worked out how we really wanted our hero to look, and he became a soft cube. He kept the gloves and boots.
Chests, keys and an alarm clock
On that same second day, chests appeared underground, in ten tiers right away, from Wooden to Infernal. Each one lies at the depth of its own ore, and its key lies somewhere else. A key opens any chest of its tier.
The most important idea came at once: a chest doesn't open in your hands. You have to carry it home and put it on a stand, and then an alarm clock starts ticking above it. The clock is real and keeps running even when the game is closed. At first the waits ran from one minute to twelve hours. Later we made them longer, and now every chest takes its own time: a Wooden chest opens in a couple of minutes, an Infernal one in a day to a day and a half.
Inside every chest is an artifact. There were fifty of them from the start, in six rarities, from Common to Mythic.
A three-story house
The chests needed somewhere to stand, so Cubby got a three-story house: the attic with a bed at the top, the treasury with ten stands in the middle, and the kitchen with a fireplace at the bottom. Under the house is the vault, dug out level by level.
Opened artifacts go on shelves, and each one earns coins: the rarer the artifact, the more it earns. The coins drop into a pile, and collecting them is easy: just walk over them. A pile grows for three hours and then waits for its owner.
Neighbors
In the very first week the world grew to six houses: yours and five more for other Cubbies. On the outside they're all different: a log cabin, a castle, a Japanese house, a chalet, a mushroom cottage and a timber-framed house. On the inside they're laid out the same, so nobody gets an advantage.
The treasure underground is shared by all: whoever finds a chest first gets to keep it. But a chest that already sits on someone else's stand is theirs. That's how the game got its race, and the TOP list, where you can see who has gathered how much.
The desert and quests
By the end of the first week the forest had its first ten quests, each with its own character, its own story and its own help in finding chests and keys. Creatures moved into the caves: the Cobweb Spider, Bats, the Rat, the Snappy Crayfish, the Fire Salamander and Wild Bees.
On September 26 the second land opened: the desert. It has dunes and mesas, oases, tombs with chests, fossils, geodes, cacti and tumbleweed, plus fish and animals of its own. The next day the desert got twelve quests of its own, among them "The Big-Eared Guide," "The Fakir's Rope" and "The Scarab Charm." And on September 28 the desert grew: it gained Lapis and Pharaoh's chests and a new rarity of artifacts, Ancient.
Grandad's letter
That same day you could start playing on a phone: touch controls arrived. And on September 29 Grandad's letter appeared by every door. Grandad Oldby writes where the first treasure is hidden: in the forest it's under an old stump by the house, in the desert it's in a dry well.
At the same time came:
- Grandad's Book, where every artifact you find is recorded;
- signs of the day, 88 constellations and 7 planets: each day a different sign rules, and each has its own quirks;
- Grandad's Fuser in the vault under the house, which fuses several artifacts into a new one.
A name and an address of our own
On September 30 the game got its name: "Dig, Cubby, Dig!" The hero became Cubby, Grandad became Oldby, and everyone living in this world became the Cubbies. That same day the hero turned into a soft cube, and newcomers now meet a short prologue in a mine before they create their hero.
On October 1 the game got its own server: the world, the hero and the coins are now kept there, not just on your computer. And on October 2 the game moved to an address of its own: cubbydig.io. How the game went online and what it took, we'll tell you in the next post.
A month isn't much at all. But looking back, it feels like a whole year has gone by. Thanks for digging with us!