Forest Frenzy! Devlog 1 - From Humble Beginnings

     

From Humble Beginnings

    Work on Forest Frenzy started last year as a passion project of mine. My inspiration for the game came from the concept of gamification, and in this case improving reflexes & hand-eye coordination. Forest Frenzy is by no means groundbreaking, yet it's mine to cater to my liking from the ground up. With my sights set on a killer game, I fired up Visual Studio and Unity, and got to coding. I started by creating a countdown timer, a 4x4 grid full of blank tiles, and simple tile images. Below is an early screenshot of the game, with green, red, and purple game tiles.

    The main game loop was now in place; tiles spawning randomly, the ability for the player to click a tile to gain or lose points. 

Brick By Brick

    From this point, I starting playing around with the tile spawn speed to see what intervals made sense to have for feasible game levels. A three level structure stood out to me as a great starting point by offering beginner players to get up to speed with the game, while giving intermediate and advanced players a fast-paced experience. 

    Once that was implemented, I looked to create other game modes to give players variety. Lines Mode and Sniper Mode arose as fun and enjoyable game mode options. Lines Mode would alternate between a random row and column, and spawn a line of green tiles, and the rest of the gameboard is filled with red tiles. The 30 second countdown timer and scoring system was left the same for this game mode. 

    Sniper Mode entails a single green tile spawned at a time. Only the finest of snipers should try their luck, as tapping on a blank tile ends the game. The object here is to avoid the blank tiles, while only tapping green tiles to reach the target score in the fastest time.

    For the time being, Lines and Sniper mode aren't in the latest release of Forest Frenzy. I wanted to dial it back and focus on the main "Frenzy Mode", which is the current standard game mode.