QuickBlast

A shooter that transports you around the world, testing your tapping skills against hordes of wooden enemies.

Platforms: iOS, Android｜Read Time: 3 mins

Alpha gameplay demo made in Unity.

Inspiration and hesitation

If you were around in the 90s, chances are you’ve played “Duck Hunt.” Let’s admit, it’s a cult classic. My goal was to modernize, while maintain, the same feel of this classic point-and-shoot game. Of course, this also meant being sensitive around the topics of animal cruelty and gun control. In the end, if you want to make a game for the masses you should be conscious of the current political climate.

That dogs laugh will haunt me forever!

Enter QuickBlast, a shooter where your targets are whimsically illustrated wooden animal cutouts.

Travel to the prehistoric times!

Getting it right

When crafting a game, there are many ways to kickoff the design process. For me it always starts with the mechanics. The concept of wooden cutouts was intriguing, but the initial implementation seemed to be missing the “wow” factor. I realized three things when I began to rapidly prototype the game:

Having the wooden boards topple after tapping them once or even a few times wasn’t providing the best level of entertainment.
Simply tapping on the screen was not only repetitive but also tiring. There needed to be some variety; some challenge.
To achieve the feeling of wood, I had to find a way to showcase thickness and weight with the animal cutouts, using 3D in a 2D environment.

Simply tapping, like a typical gallery shooter, wasn't doing it for me.

These issues were okay. If it doesn’t work when you prototype, you re-iterate and improve.
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In comes the “blast” portion of the game title. What’s more fun than seeing wood explode into pieces!? This idea lead through a breakthrough after many many cups of coffee. It helped add many levels of complexity to the game and addressed all the main issues I was dealing with.
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It helped assign strength to different animal types and displayed their halfway points in a 3D design.

Pterodactyl took 5 taps to destroy. At 3 taps you will see its halfway point in a faked 3D.

To introducing a variety of weapons to select from, each with an ability to inflict more damage than the other, of course with cool off times.

Left to right: weak/unlimited bullets, medium/4 shots/5 sec sleep, strong/1 shots/10 sec sleep.

The design

The game contained over a 100 illustrated animals, including some mythical creatures.

Had a ton of fun designing these!

18 weapons, each with their own unique shooting animation. Of course the realistic weapons would have to go. In the end we didn’t want to represent actual weapons.

Left to right: weakest weapons to the strongest.

Animations of the weapons when you tap on the screen.

12 levels with three game modes: Campaign, Limited Bullets, and Hardcore.

Different worlds to explore. Bonus a sketch easter egg level!

Beyond

Unity is not my strong suit, and though I was able to create a prototype thanks to some javascript knowledge I possess, the game needs a far more experienced developer to be able to handle all the animation and create a smoother gameplay. Once I find a partner, I hope to bring QuickBlast to all devices!