Development of Dropert
In 2019 I made a small arcade game and released it on the AppStore. It’s not selling well so I decided to move the website to www.indiana-jonas.com/dropert and cancel the www.dropert.com domain. I had the following text published on the first mentioned web-address so I decided to put it here instead to make sure it’s not lost.
I recommend listening to the music I made for it while you read through this: Dropert OST.
Dropert is a premium arcade game for mobile devices. You dodge drops of water and occasionally a bomb. You have to carry fruit to a basket to get points. There’s a range of characters to play as and I also wrote 100 poems that you can unlock.
I designed, coded, arted, sounded and musiced it myself. It took 6 months
I came up with the mechanic first and had no idea what I wanted to do in terms of graphics. I was briefly working with a publisher at the start of this project and we both agreed it would make sense if you were a tiny creature running on the forest floor dodging debree and rain drops.
This is some ideas of what the game might’ve looked like if I had decided to go with that theme. I decided to finish the game without a publisher.
I didn’t want the player to think so much about the world the game was taking place in and to me a believable world didn’t really add anything to this experience. I liked the clean, abstract, sewer-looking sketches from before so I wiped up this concept in Blender an afternoon and then everything fell into place for me.
My bestie drew this because they thought maybe there is a huge cat crying somewhere over the stage. I think I wrote a poem about this.
A few sketches of characters.
The final cast of characters, animated and integrated. Berty McDrop, Alhusein, Suzuki, Mx.Nips, Mascara and Saliva.
It wasn’t completely obvious to me how the gameplay was gonna work. At first you were just chasing a coin and dodging the drops. It worked but it felt too basic so I tried a few different iterations. One idea I liked a lot but it was so different I had to strip away the drops completely, it turned into a completely different game. The idea was that pieces of clay would fall onto the stage and you had to push them into eachother to make them grow, when you had combined 3 pieces of clay they magically turned into a block that you could use to expand the stage. The size of the stage would be your score. This gave me more design questions to answer than I had in the first place and it was a lot more technically challenging so I decided to scrap this idea.
But pushing the clay made me realise how fun it was to push stuff while stuff was falling from above. This lead me to putting fruit in the game. It’s very satisfying to push a row of fruit into the basket.
Dropert is currently available on the AppStore and Itch.io. Latest info at www.indiana-jonas.com/dropert.
