Diamond Valley 2024
Description
Diamond Valley 2024, marketed simply as Diamond Valley, is a limited-time game released by Google as a promotional event for their app store rewards program Google Play Points, as well as to advertise popular apps who partnered to sponsor the Diamond Valley game. The game was accessible from web browsers or the Google Play mobile app on Android phones.
New features
The game was a follow-up to Diamond Valley 2023 and re-used the same core mechanics, narrative, and gameplay. However, in the 2024 version the spritework for nearly the whole game was redesigned, including characters and building layouts, and new exclusive features were added for each of the three countries that the game released in. All regions received a new minigame integrated into the narrative called "Diamond Hero" in which the player controls the primary companion character from the narrative, "Little-bot", in an arena of horde survival gameplay where they move the auto-attacking Little-bot around to defeat progressively larger waves of robotic enemies surrounding the player. The Taiwanese release of the game focused around adding community-based features, including team challenges such as interacting with other players in the same team, leaderboards, and group emojis that could be used with others to earn points. The Japanese release of the game focused on highlighting Android's then-new "Circle to Search" feature, allowing players to use the feature and then circle elements in-game to interact with the environment.
A new set of sponsors were included in the 2024 release of the game, as well as areas that the player could travel to within the game that directly related to those sponsors. Certain sponsoring apps and groups included Honkai: Star Rail, Solo Leveling, Genshin Impact, Zenless Zone Zero, Monster Strike, K-Pop group Le Sserafim, and others.
Gameplay
The game is a simple 2D platformer in which the player can walk left and right, jump, talk to characters, and access a persistent inventory. The player takes on the role of an "engineer" who appears one day in the technologically advanced Diamond City. They are equipped with a mysterious "tool" that they are able to use to fix robots, who make up the majority of the Diamond City population. The player is guided through the game by "Little-bot" after repairing the friendly robot. Other real-life players in the game can be seen in the hub world but cannot be interacted with.
There are five primary levels in the game that the player progresses through in the story: the Warehouse, Hotel, Luxury Store, Depths, and Diamond Core. There are also additional areas of Diamond Rise, Crystal Cave, and "???". Each level has a certain amount of Diamonds that can be collected within it, and Diamonds could be spent to buy entries for raffle giveaways of digital rewards such as Google Play Points as well as real-world technology products and branded merchandise for the sponsoring apps. (Such as hats, water bottles, T-shirts, plushes, new phones, and more.) The raffle system was revamped from the 2023 version of the game, allowing players to select specific prizes they wanted to enter for. Different sets of prizes were made available depending on the user's existing Google Play Points rank.
In Japan, Diamond Valley 2024 launched on December 12, 2023 and was taken offline on January 9, 2024. In South Korea, the game was available from October 1, 2024 to November 5, 2024. In Taiwan, the game ran from December 5, 2024 to January 6, 2025. Prizes were sent out to the raffle winners shortly after.