Welcome back to the Orchid of Redemption devlog! This week were looking at some of the inspiration sources for the gameplay and design of Mage Drops! If you are yet to dabble in the enchanted golf-like physics that define Mage Drops, you can find a free demo here! While of course golf and mini golf are very much part of the Mage Drops formula, a few less apparent inspirations are traditional pinball games and an obscure indie gem, I Am Level, where all the diverse interactions in the game are powered by a single button press.

Bumpers not Bubbles:

Throughout the many worlds of Mage Drop the obstacles you face and their positioning is more akin to pinball design principles than to golf. With giant bubbles to launch you, grappling points to boost your momentum and rotating starfish to obstruct your path, the levels of Mage Drops can be viewed as never-before-seen pinball evolutions. In fact, before a patch in June this year, the bumpers (pictured) that you have come to know and love and grind your teeth in frustration at as they launch you in the wrong direction, were styled as the standard pinball flippers! While it would have been great to keep these flippers in Mage Drops as a clear nod to the pinball origins that helped create Mage Drops, unfortunately their design and interaction with the levels and the orb itself didnt suit the aesthetic and theme that we are aiming for in Mage Drops.

Its all in the Shift:

Pinball served as an inspiration not only in level design and obstacle interaction, but in the simplicity of player/controller input. The minimal design of one or two button inputs on pinball machines to control only the base flippers was reimagined in how the player manipulates interactive obstacles within Mage Drops. These interactive elements are communicated to the player via a double-ring symbol to immediately flag what the player can control and change across the various levels of Mage Drops. The bumpers, rotatable bridges, grapple stars, magic trees, gravity wells and the many other magical obstacles of Mage Drops are all exclusively controlled by the shift key. Some require a single press la pinball to gain the best results while others need the shift key be held to get you where you need to go kind of like holding the pinball flipper up to make sure the ball doesnt accidently shoot down the hole! This design principle also allowed for unique gameplay interaction where the player controls the actual level of the game almost as much as the avatar and the trajectory/velocity of the orb. In having a single input for multiple interactions, we could create new sources of challenge and creative gameplay when designing levels with multiple interactive obstacles. This enabled us to create a huge range of interactions in the game, allowing the player to make their own discoveries through trial and error, since they can see all, they need to do is press Shift, but they can discover how to leverage the affordances of each type of gameplay device themselves!

Connecting the Pindots

A moment of clarity as to how well pinball can be combined with design elements of golf and gameplay came from a humble indie game called I Am Level by Smiling Bag. As mentioned, regular old analogue pinball was a key inspiration, but in our subconscious, I Am Level bridged the gap between pinball and avatar-centric video-game mechanics, and foregrounded the idea of controlling the world instead of the avatar (although in Mage Drops you do a bit of both). Perhaps the clearest example of where pinball gameplay shines over golf design is throughout World 6: Trickster World. While we have spoken at length about how well this world developed with procedural generation dictating level designs, due the immense verticality of some of the later levels and the mixture of obstacles from previous worlds, gameplay becomes reminiscent of Full Tilt! Pinball, especially if you are unfortunate enough to fall from lofty heights. Other examples are the vertically orientated levels of World 4: The Haunted Mines and a unique, level in World 3: The Ruins where the player must chase receding waters downward in order to find the goal!

Fore-ward:

That's all for this week's Mage Drops devlog! We recently had a great review from Nepiki Gaming so if you want to hear what other people are saying about Mage Drops then read all about it here!
Mage Drops is available now in Early Access on Steam and Itch. Wishlist and try the demo today! Steam: http://bit.ly/372pEwZ Itch: http://bit.ly/2WnT8TW Until next time, Orchid of Redemption.