You rent the shop next to the bank. You have eleven nights. The dirt is the problem. A 2D side-on heist game where the tunnel is the level and you build it yourself — badly, usually, because you were in a hurry.
In every other digging game the spoil vanishes into your inventory. Here it stays. Every cubic metre you remove has to go somewhere, and the somewhere is your problem — the back room, then under the floorboards, then a van at 4am while the man next door walks his dog. That one rule generates the whole game: it is why you cannot dig straight at the vault, why the tunnel has a shape, and why a job that is going well still looks like a disaster in progress.
The digging is only about a third of it. The rest is dealing with what the digging did.
You are underground, so nobody can see you. Detection is indirect, which is better — every channel is something you can plan around once you understand it.
Heat is a meter, not a switch. It rises, decays slowly, and buys the city things — more patrols, a car parked outside overnight, a survey crew on the street. Jobs are lost by accumulation, not by one mistake.
Each score funds the next. Tools do not only make you faster — each one beats a detection channel you could not beat before.
| Tier | Buys | What it changes |
|---|---|---|
| Hand | Spade, pick, timber props | Quiet, slow, no power. Everything else is measured against this. |
| Power | Auger, jackhammer, generator | Fast and loud. Now you need the train timetable. |
| Logistics | Spoil cart, conveyor, second van | Beats the spoil channel. The upgrade that feels best to own. |
| Water | Pump, hose run, sump | Lets you dig below the water table at all. |
| Recon | Ground radar, plans from the council | Utilities and voids stop being ambushes. |
| Bypass | Sensor jammer, alarm loop, keys | Buys sustained digging under seismic cover. |
| Breach | Core drill, thermic lance | Concrete and vault steel. Gates the last targets. |
Somebody sees you, and there is a number you can call. It is expensive, and it turns a burglary into a homicide — heat that never decays, and a detective on the city permanently who does not work to a timetable. It should always look like the clean answer at 3am and always be the reason a run ends badly. Paying a witness off, moving them, or simply never being seen is the skilled play.
Each target has a soil profile, a security package, utilities in the way, and nearby properties you can rent. The rental is the first real decision of every job: the flat next door means a short tunnel and an obvious suspect, the lock-up two streets over means you are invisible but digging for a week.
| Target | Nights | Score | Teaches |
|---|---|---|---|
| Corner shop safe | 1 | 1,500 | Digging, props, spoil. No security at all. |
| Pawnbroker | 2 | 4,200 | A neighbour who is home, and a dog. |
| Jeweller's | 3 | 16,000 | First alarm. First reason to buy a bypass. |
| Bank branch | 5 | 32,000 | Seismic sensors, a guard, and concrete. |
| Clearing house | 8 | 68,000 | Water table. You dig below it or you do not get in. |
| The Exchange | 11 | 180,000 | All of it, and a vault floor that needs a lance. |
A night is 25,200 seconds and the digging model runs in plain logic, so whole campaigns can be played through outside the game to check the design's claims: that each target is reachable in the nights it allows with the tools it expects, that it is not reachable without them, that spoil balances, and that each score funds the next kit. All six targets currently land on or near their final night.
That check found four real problems the first time it ran, including every target finishing on night one — the deadline, which is the entire point of a heist with a night count, did not exist. It is part of the build now, so a balance change that breaks the ladder fails before it ships.
Everything you see is generated in code — every tile, the digger, the spoil heaps, the street above the tunnel and the HUD frames. Eight strata each get their own palette and their own grain: sand laid down in horizontal bedding, gravel with pebbles that catch the light, rock with fractures that wander, vault steel with panel seams and rivets. Ground with open air above it takes a lit rim, so a freshly cut roof reads as a surface and the layers read as depth.
The street is the part that makes the premise visible. You rent the unit next to the target and dig across, so the building you are tunnelling at is drawn at the distance you actually have to dig — the same conversion the dig itself uses, which means thirty-nine metres is something you can see across the road rather than a number in the corner of the screen. The six targets do not look alike: the early ones are shuttered high-street units, the late ones are columns and a strongroom door.
Six jobs, in order, each one teaching what the next assumes you know. You start with four hundred pounds, a spade, some timber props and a cart. Between nights there is a shop: every tool lists what it beats, because the decision is never "which is best" but "which of tonight's six ways of being caught am I buying my way out of". A tool you own is an option and never an obligation — buy a jackhammer for a job with no sensors and it will not follow you to one that has them.
The whole ladder is played end to end outside the game on every build, starting from that four hundred pounds and shopping out of what the last job paid. It is not enough for each job to be winnable in isolation: the money has to arrive in the right order too. That check found four more problems the first time it ran.
In development. The design and the underlying model are done and verified, and there is now a playable scene — built entirely at runtime, so the whole game is one empty scene and a script. What has not happened is anyone running it: the project has never been opened in a Unity Editor, so the art has only ever been seen through an offline renderer, and nothing about how it feels to play is known yet.
The engine work underneath — destructible terrain, procedural generation, the offline tooling — came from an earlier extraction-shooter build of Dug Out that shares the name and about half the codebase, and which is preserved, finished and playable, on its own branch.
No Steam page yet, and no store art.