Making Drones

I spent about a month on the actual concept of what the game is about, designing the
key characters and events
The most important tool at this point was a pencil and paper! But I did some digital
sketches also.
Once the design silhouette reads well I’d sign off on the process

 

icon-concepts

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Gameplay and core mechanics
Having nailed down the designs it was on to the core mechanics and game play. I spent
another 3/4 weeks on logic flows for each of the outlined events that can happen during
the game. Again this was done just using pen and paper and I can’t stress how critical
this was before writing a single line of scripts/code

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Prototyping
OK.. because I gave careful attention to the previous steps this went fairly smoothly. I
found some annoying/silly limitations with the software but I found workarounds for
about 80% of them (hence my comments before about matching 80%)
I did make one costly mistake here: as I swapped in the real graphics for the proxies the
performance nose-dived. It wasn’t possible to accurately simulate the target devices so I
had to scale back the graphics/effects based on the physical devices I could get my
hands on – not a satisfactory solution but it was all I had.
Writing and adding the music was fun! I found it a great way to opening my mind to
finding lateral solutions

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I didn’t realize it would be such a cathartic process creating a game: from concept to
finished product.
Don’t get me wrong there were times I found it infuriating as I tried to navigate the
schism between my imagination and what the tools can actually achieve however the
finished product is indeed something that matches about 80% of my original concept
and is something I am proud of

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