Subterranean

"Subterranean" is a multiplayer strategy board game about digging, building, and conquering The Valley! Play as a group of either Moles or Meerkats as you collect pieces of Grass, Dirt, Stone, and Gold from the environment. Use these pieces to activate cards in your hand that thwart your opponent or lead you closer to victory! Subterranean was made during my Sophomore year of university over 6 months with a small team.

Subterranean was very much my "baby" at the time. I believed so much in this game, to the point that I was ready to sink myself into a project again after finishing Arboreal earlier that year. This was basically where I started to learn about many of my favorite mechanics to work on in a video game. The big one was a grid system. I personally find grids incredibly satisfying! I love how they look aesthetically, I love how they naturally build "rules" for how things should work, and I enjoy how they naturally use whole numbers. For example, a distance of "two" on a grid is significantly more than a distance of "one!" As opposed to a game with free movement, where you could be practically anywhere at any time. I also really enjoy cards and card systems in games. Things like resource management, decks, unique effects, suits, etc. Cards I feel are incredibly flexible, and have their spot in a digital game as well.

Ultimately, this was a game all about using the cards in your hand to impact the grid, which was the board! It's a fairly elegant flow in concept, but was handled quite roughly in Subterranean. The biggest issue with this game was the context in which we were developing it. It's a board game that takes around an hour or more to play, requires heavy amounts of playtesting, needs constant iteration, and so on. We were a team of 4, with only two of us having programming experience. Because of this, we chose to create Subterranean physically first, with a print-and-play version. The rest of the team started there while I built the backend systems that made Subterranean actually work (which mind you, are not very good. I was not too experienced at this time.).

As development went deeper and deeper, I became very focused on creating a "balanced" experience for Subterranean. I played the game rather consistently with some friends, so we were able to figure out what aspects of the game were strong, what aspects were weak, and what mechanics didn't have a strong place in the game's moment-to-moment gameplay. Focusing this much on balance was fun for me, as I felt like I was actually making something GOOD. And I believed this, even as I marked this game as "complete." I really do think that Subterranean is something special, and that there's a lot of potential waiting in that game concept.

I decided to revisit Subterranean after I graduated university with fresh eyes. Honestly, the game's a mess. There are so many unexplained tiny mechanics, so many "bandages" in the game's design existing in-place for balance, and so many bugs! You need so much initial knowledge to actually understand what's going on in Subterranean, and it's quite frustrating. It's to the point that it makes you feel like you have no real influence over the game itself. A lot of this was because I simply did not know any better at the time. Maybe there was a mechanic I didn't know how to code, maybe there was a design change I did not have time for, but ultimately I was very blinded by my love for the game.

Don't tell anyone, but I think that some day, I would love to return to this concept and try again. In the meantime, here's the 3 amazing people I worked with. To this day, they're one of my favorite groups of developers.
- Andrea Swihart-DeCoster
- Caelie Joyner
- Sean Forrester