Underground Grind

Undergroud Grind is a homebrew game for the Nintendo 64 by RaisedWizardry and released on 13 December 2024. You play as one of four snakes who are competing to find underground treasure.

You can get the ROM from its download page by using the password minigamemadness and the source can be found here. Note that this is the same ROM that includes all the other minigames released for the 2024 N64brew Game Jam competition.

About Underground Grind

The game takes place in a square arena where each player plays as a snake. They start off on each wall, and there’s a series of nine black cubes in the centre. The objective is to dig at the blocks until you get to the one that has the treasure inside.

In theory, you’re supposed to alternate between pressing A and Z in order to mine the blocks faster, but I found that it has little effect; the blocks always seem to be destroyed after three strikes either way.

That’s all there is to it really, there isn’t a way to attack or stun the other players so you just need to focus on attacking the blocks as quickly as possible. The only strategy you can try to do is snipe the other player’s blocks after they’ve dealt damage to it already, but that’s about it.

Credits

Underground Grind was made by RaisedWizardry as a solo developer.

Review and conlusion

Though it might not be obvious to someone just playing the compiled ROM, Underground Grind is a “ROM hack” of a sample game called Snake3D which is meant to demonstrate how to make a Tiny3D game for the 2024 game jam. The games are nearly identical, the only difference being that Snake3D has no central blocks so the objective is to attack the other snakes instead.

What has been added to the base Snake3D game is a few additional assets like the black boxes and the treasure box, and then you have the differing gameplay. Now that I think about it, it is very similar to another two games from the game jam, Destroy! and Le Tohu Bohu. In all games, you have a bunch of objects placed on a grid, and you have to strike them or search them randomly.

There are two main issues with the design for this game. The first is that it’s not entirely clear what is happening to the blocks. It takes about 3 hits to destroy one, but there is no indicator that anything is happening – no cracks on the block, shake or even a sound effect. So it feels as though your hits are missing and that only on the third hit you hit your mark.

The other issue is that the randomness makes it feel unfair. It’s the luck of the draw so there’s not much you can do besides hitting as many blocks as possible and trying to get lucky.

While it might seem that Underground Grind is underwhelming, I think that looking into the context it was made in make it more understandable. It feels like the kind of game where the developer wanted to make something grandiose, but had to cut back due to needing to deliver something by the looming deadline.

It was RaisedWizardry’s first attempt at bringing a game to the Nintendo 64 and he wanted to create a game with unique models and animations, but having no experience in doing so, it was very difficult. Not only that, but it was his first foray into working with C programming (as a professional web dev) so it was a learning experience in both the technical and artistic side of things.

I think that while Underground Grind is a very simple hack of what is a sample game, it does show that its author knows how to create a dev environment, create assets and write some original C code. It’s definitely got the building blocks set up to a promising future.