Game Development Dairy #4 Super Drop Zone

My game idea for the One Game A Month challenge has finally moved from paper to Adobe Illustrator. So far I have mocked up four of the backgrounds and a couple of assets.

Super Drop Zone

I have been playing around with a few concepts but I wanted to make my first game really simple and fun. The basic game play is a simple tap to open parachute, and that’s it. If you land your package you earn money…

Obviously I am going to build on this core game play mechanic and introduce obstacles, moving landing zones and power ups but those details will have to wait. I am starting with the Para Drop template and changing over the assets to fit my style.

I have designed everything at 1024×768 for iPad and will probably export them at various sizes from iPad retina display down to 320×480. The game will have two modes, a simple arcade mode that will be a quick pick up and play mode where you choose your level and see how long you can last on five lives. Bonuses and power ups will appear periodically and your aim is to go for the high score.

The challenge mode will be a little deeper and see you pitted against the clock to earn money for successful drops. Money can be used to unlock levels and buy power ups. Any level you unlock in the challenge mode will be available in the arcade mode. The challenge mode will see levels split into three sub levels and there will be the standard safe drop zone, a hot zone (with objects and enemies) and a moving zone where the floor will move and you get more points for landing in a particular spot.

At this time I do not think I will have any in-app purchasing to get more coins but that’s only because I am unsure how to do it at this time. I will leave things like in-app purchases and iAds for the end. Its amazing that such a simple game would need so many graphic assets.

I keep relapsing into my over scoping disease and thing of lots of great features I could add it but I need to keep on top of it and keep it simple… otherwise I will never get it finished in time. Obviously as this is month one of the one game a month challenge there will be lots of people who don’t finish game one on time.

I don’t want to be one of them.