Dig, Dug, Deeper is released to the wild.
I can’t believe it’s finally live. I developed, did the art, marketing, the everything for this game. A 1 person crew pulling 16+ hour days to make it happen. But finally after being inside ALL of labor day weekend I was able to push “Submit for Review” Monday night on the literal 11th hour. 6 hours later Dig, Dug, Deeper was approved by Apple and submit to the store. Wow.
Update: It’s now available on the Google Play Store as “Drill Deeper“.
My 3rd self published game “Dig, Dug, Deeper” was an epic journey of learning. The tools, the art program, generating the art, formatting it all to fit in game. There were times I was delirious and couldn’t think more than 3 seconds ahead. So I’d take a break and get back to it. The end result of this personal abuse is an amazingly well polished game.
I must have submit Dig, Dug, Deeper 8-9 times on Labor Day. On it’s own, that’s 45 minutes to compile and submit. I don’t have a Mac, I can’t afford one yet. So I have to export to a share drive, load a Mac VM (virtual machine), copy the files over to the Mac VM, load Xcode, compile and submit.
I went through thousands of stock images to find the right characters, there’s 10 in all now. I’m no artist, but I can splice together art like crazy. I followed a guide on making a stone font for the title art. I haven’t played GTA V in over a month, and really feeling the burn out.
Thing is, in my wound up mind, unwinding like a squirrel on crack, I absolutely love video games. I’ve wanted to make them forever, but my struggle to survive each day was far greater than the desire to work for “Sierra”. So here I am starting small, releasing Dig, Dug, Deeper to the wild in hopes it’ll fund my larger aspirations, making a full fledged RPG or Space Sim. I don’t believe in “Kick Starter” or begging for cash to raise funds for my larger dreams. It’s why I’m releasing these small games at first. They’re my “fund raisers” giving something tangible to the community in hopes they give something back. I hope that I don’t get stuck making smallish mobile games forever. I have bigger plans, bigger dreams.
Thanks for reading and sticking with me through all this.