Nuggy Rush

A mining game where you play as a frontier miner named Eugene "Nuggy" Smith who is trying to keep an impossible promise to his Ma — building her a house of gold!

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Short description

Mine gold, buy survival tools, and outwit spreading underground hazards across five mines. Nuggy promised Ma a house of gold. Help him live long enough to build it.

Inspiration

Nuggy Rush grew out of the mining games I loved as a kid and a simple question: how much further would you dig when you really should be heading back?

You play as Eugene “Nuggy” Smith, a frontier miner with an ambitious promise to his Ma: build her a house of gold. I wanted that warm, funny story to give every dangerous trip underground a purpose.

What it does

Nuggy Rush is a single-player, portrait Survival & Resource Management game built around one repeatable loop: mine gold → return to sell → buy useful supplies → survive the next trip.

Your resources pull you in different directions. Stamina limits how much work and travel you can afford, backpack capacity limits what you can carry, and spending your earnings on supplies leaves less cash toward your next Payday star. A richer seam is tempting, but reaching it and getting home are two different problems.

Gold becomes practical survival options through the surface shop:

  • Burrow Charges clear a three-tile line without spending stamina and can clear a connected gas cloud. They also destroy unmined gold without paying you for it, so a shortcut has a cost.
  • Trail Rations restore 15 stamina underground, with a limit of two per run. They buy breathing room, but they are a finite reserve.
  • Mine Supports protect up to three nearby tunnel tiles from collapse when placed on a falling-sand warning. Preparing an escape route can matter as much as finding another seam.

Meanwhile, magma and gas spread through open tunnels in real time. Digging changes the space those hazards can enter. Cave-ins threaten routes, and Nugget Vampire Bats threaten your haul. The survival pressure comes from managing a changing mine while deciding what your remaining resources can safely achieve.

The Golden Trail contains five campaign mines and fifteen Payday stars, with mine-specific objectives that bring different survival decisions forward. Earn the required first-star result and objective to advance, or pursue three-star mastery across the trail to complete Nuggy's promise and reveal the Golden House ending. A replayable guided tutorial introduces the systems through actions, with Nuggy's commentary keeping the lessons in character.

How I built it

I built Nuggy Rush with HTML, CSS, Three.js, and Codex, without writing the implementation code myself. My role was directing the game, reviewing its behavior, playing it, and asking for revisions to its mechanics, balance, presentation, and mobile interface.

Development happened in repeated build, test, and revision passes. The current submission is a 5.29 MB ZIP containing the game and its local dependencies. Sound feedback is synthesized locally with Web Audio.

Challenges I ran into

Mobile readability and teaching the survival rules took repeated iteration. Tutorial cards, speech bubbles, controls, and highlighted tiles all needed to share a narrow screen. Testing and recording on a phone exposed presentation problems that needed targeted fixes.

The design challenge was making the tools matter to the same mining loop. Charges can save stamina while sacrificing gold; rations extend a trip but cost earnings; supports help preserve a route through unstable ground. Each purchase changes the next decision underground.

Accomplishments I'm proud of

  • Five campaign mines, fifteen Payday stars, saved progression, and a replayable Golden House finale.
  • A guided tutorial tested through 29 gameplay actions and nine major lessons.
  • 83/83 guided-tutorial checks and 49/49 clean-package checks recorded as passing on the latest packaged build, with zero external or failed requests and zero browser errors in the package smoke test.
  • A separate 79/79 campaign check pass recorded during the preceding sound-release validation, covering progression and the ending.
  • A game with a character and a promise behind the gold collecting. I also got my real-life Ma to play it.

What I learned

Building with AI still involves a lot of judgment: deciding what should happen, checking what actually happens, and revising until the two agree. Automated checks helped catch regressions; playing the game helped me judge its pacing, readability, and feel.

What's next

I'd like to explore an endless Arcade mode with themed mines and rare artifacts. The priority would be to keep developing the gathering, spending, and survival decisions that make Nuggy's trips underground interesting.

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