A mining-management + tower-defence mobile web game, built from my own teardown of Drill Core with an AI-assisted workflow. Mine and grow your crew by day, defend the platform at night, decide when to evacuate with your rewards.
Built in Sep–Oct 2026 at Bloom Labs, originally for the studio's web platform.
▶ Play in browser · Drill Core teardown · Offline download
| Mining by day | Night defence |
|---|---|
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- Research → design → playable build. I analysed Drill Core from gameplay footage into a structured teardown (loop, economy, progression, unknowns), then turned it into a spec and a complete game with its own names, art and balance.
- Systems design. Day/dusk/night cycle, coal-gated descent, worker AI (miners, haulers, guards), turrets and active abilities, enemy waves and three biome bosses, contract objectives, permanent upgrade tree, three platform classes, guided first contract.
- Mobile-first UX. Portrait layout, touch and mouse controls, pause and speed settings, local saves.
- Verification. 36 automated tests (rule acceptance, tutorial, progression and an end-to-end completion smoke test), TypeScript type-check and a single-file production build.
I work as a designer-director with AI coding agents (Codex, Claude):
| Step | Me | AI tools |
|---|---|---|
| Teardown | chose the game, defined what to measure, checked every claim against footage | frame extraction and first-pass notes (Gemini) |
| Design | wrote the rules: what to keep, what to change for touch/portrait, what to invent for unknowns (DESIGN.md) | drafting tables |
| Build | split the work into tasks, reviewed every change, playtested each iteration | code generation in TypeScript |
| QA | acceptance criteria, playtests, bug lists, balance passes | turning acceptance criteria into tests |
DESIGN.md marks every rule as kept from the reference, decided here or adapted for mobile, so a reviewer can see the design reasoning, not just the result.
src/core— simulation: contracts, workers, resources, combatsrc/render— canvas renderer and procedural arttests— acceptance, tutorial and progression testsresearch— the Drill Core teardownASSETS.md— licences for third-party graphics, sounds and fonts
Node.js 18+.
npm ci
npm run dev # local dev server
npm test # 36 tests
npm run build # type-check + single-file release/DeepContract.htmlDrill Core is the reference game analysed in the teardown; no names, art, audio or text from it are used in Deep Contract. Third-party assets keep their licences, listed in ASSETS.md and on the in-game Credits screen.
Made by Arseni Atrokhov · more projects