A mining gameand the server behind it
Drill Run is a tile-based Android game built in Kotlin, backed by a Spring Boot API that handles accounts, scores and everything the law says has to come with them.
What it is
You play as a mole on an 8×8 grid. Travelling as far as you can, you'll encounter various ores, fruits and monsters. Mining all the stone and ores will enable you to progress to the next level. Use the fruits to your advantage, get better pickaxes and if you travel far enough, you might find treasure!
Meanwhile, those monsters guard their territories - running into one costs a heart. Run out of hearts and the run is over. Your best scores may end up on the leaderboard, but a tip for you - never slow down, those tinted lights help the Mole's poor vision!
What's behind it
The game is Kotlin and Jetpack Compose with no game engine — a hand-written loop, fixed-timestep simulation, and an immutable snapshot handed to the renderer each frame. Pathfinding is breadth-first search over the tile grid.
The server is Spring Boot and PostgreSQL: JWT access tokens with rotating refresh tokens, email verification by one-time code, emailed password reset, a data export endpoint, and a confirmed account-deletion flow. This site is Thymeleaf, served by the same application.
Current top scores
Normal difficulty. Live from the server.
| 1 | Java | 328 | lvl 9 |
Accounts
You can play the whole game without an account - we don't process any data for players without accounts. However, making an account will sync your scores across devices and if you're good enough, you'll appear on the leaderboard under your nickname. There's no advertising and no analytics SDK in the app.
Who built what
Drill Run is made by Grumpy Studio - go to Privacy Policy, there is more there about us. We made most decisions together; the split below is who wrote which part.
- Michal Gromann
- Spring Boot server and API, game loop, player/entity mechanics, UI structure, this website.
- Konrad Markiewicz
- Tutorial, SFX & music pipeline, hazard mechanics, UI visual design, and most of the art.
The art is AI-generated. Neither of us are artists, i.e. we are programmers at a university and with limited time, we chose to spend it on the game and the server instead of learning to animate and draw.