About Don's Dugout

The New Look

OK, so the original Dig Dug most certainly did not have pigs in it. It did have dragons, but the other critters were some kind of unidentifiable things that looked like big-headed bugs in spacesuits. Pigs look a lot more comical when they are pumped, and that settled the matter for me.

The main character in Don's Dugout is a mole instead of a person because, well, it's more natural for moles to dig. But I had to antropomorphize him by letting him wear pants. Otherwise the players might have identified with the pigs instead. (No offense.)

I added the deadly obstacles more as a decoration than to improve the gameplay.

Sound and Graphics

Most of the visual items in the game have been prepared in advance, but not the sky and the ground. Both of them are made out of fractals, generated by a standard 2D midpoint interpolation/displacement algorithm. Doing this in Java takes time, but it only needs to be done once, before the game starts.

Some might wonder why the objects and tunnels look so randomly thrown together. That's because they are randomly thrown together. The reason they appear in identical positions each time you run the game is that I use a home-made deterministic pseudo-random number generator along with the standard one. But the clouds, the ground layers and the critter movements are based on "real" random numbers, so they will be different.

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