Rocks and Diamonds

About the game

Rocks and Diamonds is a small digging game made for the 32blit, the open-source handheld console from Pimoroni, by Phil Howard (known as Gadgetoid), who also writes much of the 32blit software kit itself. It is a homebrew game: it was written by an independent developer for the device and released under the MIT licence, and here it runs in your browser with no changes to the game.

You play a little red-haired miner underground, in a maze of packed dirt, stone walls and round brown boulders. Walk into dirt and you dig it away. Walk into a diamond and you collect it. Boulders and diamonds obey gravity: if there is nothing under them, they fall, and if something soft is under them, they may roll off to the side. A boulder that lands on you is the end of that attempt, so the whole game is about what you dig out from under what.

Each level hides a silver key and a locked staircase. Find the key, get it to the stairs and you move on to the next of four short levels. After the last one the game starts again from the first. The score at the top counts the diamonds you have picked up in the current level.

Playing it here

Click Play and the game starts in the page. The screen is the console's own 320×240 one, scaled up in whole steps so the pixels stay sharp. The game has no sound and does not save anything, so you can leave whenever you like and nothing is stored.

If you play on a phone or tablet, a direction pad and the A, B and menu buttons appear under the screen. On a computer, use the keyboard.

Controls

Tips

Look before you dig. Digging out the dirt under a boulder sends it down. Do it when you are standing somewhere else.

Boulders only go sideways when pushed from the side and only if the square behind them is empty, so you can use them as plugs for dead ends.

Bombs clear a way. They go off a moment after you drop them and wipe out the eight squares around them, walls and boulders included, so step away at once. If you get stuck, restart with X: levels are short.

FAQ

Is this the same as Boulder Dash? It borrows the idea of a digging game with falling stones, as many games have since the 1980s, but the maps, the pictures and the rules here are the author's own, and it is a different, much smaller game.

Does it save my progress? No. There are only four levels and each takes a few minutes.

What is a 32blit? A small open-source handheld with a 320×240 screen, a D-pad and four buttons that anyone can write games for. The games run on the device or, as here, on a computer.