Well, freeplay is coming up this week and for the event I wanted to make something to promote myself with. Tower City is all well and good but for the context of small indie development it doesn’t quite fit.
As many developers showing up to the event are focusing on the iPhone as their development platform of choice I wanted to put my hat into the ring and give my idea of what might make a fun and enjoyable iPhone game.
The result is MOLE. A game in the same vain of some classic retro games like boulder dash and dig-dug. You play as Mark the mole as you excavate the earth searching for precious gems.
It’s a simple game design in which the player has to navigate the earth and prioritise what gems they’ll go for as every second counts as Marks air supply slowly trickles away. You can find air pockets to top up your supply but they can’t be relied upon to always appear.
The game design was created with the iPhone touch screen in mind. There are basically 3 actions Mark the mole can make. Move to a location, use his metal detector or use dynamite. All activated by simply tapping the screen in some way.
Most importantly this game design has been created with the intended scope that it could be made by a team of a 2-3 people over the period of just a few months.
I’ll be handing this out in pamphlet fashion at Freeplay as part of my ongoing design folio work. While I realistically think that it’s unlikely that MOLE itself would catch the eye of a developer to be made, it’s another action I’m taking to get my name out there as a designer. :)
The 3ed image on this post is just an enlarged image of the art mock-up of MOLE if you wanted a closer look.
Overall this mock-up took about 3 1/2 days to design and illustrate.
