Dugger's Amiga version is made by Christian A. Weber as coder, Jens Eisert and Roland Petermann as artists and Markus Grimmer as producer. The original Atari version is designed by Tillmann Bubeck and Thorsten Zimmermann. Both versions were released by LINEL in 1988. In Switzerland and France, the game was sold via distributor Logico Software. In Germany, it was sold via distributor Bomico. The game features the same gameplay as Namco's classic Dig Dug. The game features 16-bit audio and visuals.

Dugger was the second game of a series of three games with a prehistoric theme around the character Herbie Stone. However, the third game with the working title Dugger 2 was never finished. The first game of the series was Linel's Breakout variant Crack, which was released earlier in 1988. In fact, the two games share almost the same intro sequence, the only difference is, that Dugger's intro sequence contains inside jokes that build on the humour of Crack's intro.

The game has a single player mode and a multiplayer mode. The multiplayer mode can be played with two joysticks or alternatively players can take turns playing with a single joystick. The player's goal is to defeat all the enemies in a level by dropping rocks on them or causing them to explode. To do this, the player controls a cave man called Herbie Stone. His enemies are called Crunchy and Frugal, and are worth 300 and 400 points respectively for standard killing, and two thousand points for killing them with a falling rock. Periodically, bonus items such as a mushroom or leaf will appear in the centre of the screen.

The game's box art was created by Herman Serrano. The booklet featured a comic by Karl Bihlmeier, a German cartoonist from Cologne who later got reasonably famous with his “Hermann, der User” Computer cartoons, that were published in Amiga magazines and many other publications. The colorful in-game graphics of prehistoric Herbie Stone were developed by Roland Petermann. Herbie Stone is a stone age human that has some everyday problems. He became the main character of the two Linel games Crack (1988) and Dugger (1988). The booklet shows Herbie's problems as funnies, short cartoons in one, two, three or more panels. Illustrations are done by Karl Bihlmeier. The cover page shows Herbie with his domestic dragon on a leash wondering about a sign that says, no dinosaurs allowed beyond this point. The funnies and the “Big Dugger Competition” did serve marketing purposes.