It's simple. It's fast. It's addictive. It's Drops!
Hi fellow developers!
In this article I would like to share my experiences while
developing my latest game "Drops". Drops is a game that
is easily identified as a type called "casual
games". A game you play during a coffee break. But as soon as you
start playing it, you get addicted. The principle is simple. Drops
that are connected vertically and horizontally and have a matching
color are removed by a click. The more Drops you remove with one
click, the higher you score. There is a bonus system that rewards
players for very good clicks. Simple isn't it?
Well, even though the game principle is simple, polishing it enough
to turn it into a product wasn't quite so simple. I encountered a number of
difficulties.
Phase 1 - Sketches
I have always wanted to do a clone of one of my favourite games in the
Nineties, called Roofrats. So I put together a stack with a couple of buttons
on it to mimic the game for me (and my spousal unit who was also an
addict), as Roofrats ran only on Classic Macs, up to OS 9. Doing the sketch was
pretty fast and I played quite a while with it. I couldn't release the stack in that state though. It had no artwork or animation in it.
Phase 2 - New ideas
So I sat down and thought what I could add to the gameplay to make it
even more fun to play. I made new columns of (at that time) colored
squares appear on screen once a column was cleared. Here we go, more
fun!
Phase 3 - Adding Artwork and animation
I played around a bit to see how I could improve removing items on
screen using animationEngine. The easing functions came in quite
handy for that purpose - just a few lines of code and the objects on
screen moved smoothly. However finding artwork that fitted was a tad
bit more complicated.
I am not an artist. No really I am not. I managed to draw the drops.
In the first versions there was no pattern on them though (more on
this in Phase 4). However, it looked quite cheap in a regular system
window. So I asked Benedikt Seidl if he could help out with a nice
windowshape and a couple of buttons. I think he did quite a good
job. :-)
Phase 4 - Beta phase
I ran a private Beta. Asked some of my friends to bang hard on the
game and test it. It turned out that the game had an addictive
potential. I got quite a few good reports which were very helpful to
fix bugs in code, but also in game design. Here are a few examples.
- The first Beta did not include a bonus system, so after only 2 days
I got a report "I can not beat my best score anymore". That would be
rather frustrating I thought, so I set up a bonus system that
rewarded good clicks. The bonus system evolved during the complete
Beta Phase.
- I received a report saying: "I have a red green deficiency, so I
will need to use the color pipette to tell the difference on
connected drops" And that's how drops got their pattern.
- A report said nice, but why doesn't it speak German. So I used
Trevor DeVore's excellent getUserLang() function and expanded it to work with
U3 devices.
- I had many requests for a way to challenge other players. I tested
the game with the chatrev gang.
For a while folks there asked what
would be the others best Scores. And that's how Drops got online
highscores (Big thanks to Daniel Kriener for the server side code for it). It
is always fun to see how well rev integrates with other languages.
Phase 5 - Preparing to ship
I asked Olli Dalley to help me out with PAYPAL integration. This was quite a task and as I am not a too proficient PHP coder I never
would have managed without his help. I whipped up a small homepage
for Drops and here we are. Shipping!
To celebrate a new game made with Rev and animationEngine I am happy
to announce that you will get a free copy of Drops with every
purchase of animationEngine for a limited time.
Buy Animation Engine or Revolution Media with Animation engine and get Drops free!
You can download a trial version of Drops from Derbill Website.
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