Turbo Drop 2048
Sole Developer • Mobile App | Published August 2021
Background
In 2021, I got hooked on a mobile game that took the number merging gameplay of 2048 and made the tiles drop from the top of the screen like Tetris. The concept was so fun to me, but the gameplay was really slow and pushed tons of microtransaction powerups and ads on the player.
At the time I had a small amount of experience with Unity, so I thought I would take a shot at recreating the gameplay myself, but with much faster animations and no microtransaction or ad spam.
I was also excited to build an OS-agnostic leaderboard so my friends and I could compare scores (that were achieved without cheaty powerups).
Execution
In order to achieve my vision, I had to teach myself many new skills in Unity. The tile movement and collisions are all handled via the built-in physics system. Checking adjacent tiles was done via 2D raycasts. Tile squashing animations were done via code and manipulating the GameObject’s scale directly.
With several more years of game development under my belt since Turbo Drop’s release, there are several improvements I would like to make to this infrastructure. And I’m doing just that!
Right now, I am working on a Godot recreation of Turbo Drop, but with deterministic board state solving and more visually appealing slimy visuals. You can check out a prototype of it at the top of my Independent Work page.
Backend & Reception
Using the PlayFab API, I created a lightweight leaderboard that isn’t tied to Game Center or Google Play Games. So users across iPhone and Android could all compare scores together in one place! This was very exciting to me, because I wanted to see how I stacked up against other players who weren’t able to use cheats. Though it turns out there are many players who are better at my own game than me.
The reception over the last 5 years has been way better than I expected! The game has 850 downloads, and surprisingly, accumulated over 5000 hours of time spent in gameplay.
Conclusion
Turbo Drop 2048 was originally published on iOS and Android, and remains available on the Apple App Store.
This project taught me so much, and many of my friends and family still play it to this day. I’m hoping it can receive new life one day in the form of Slime Drop 2048!
5.0
(6)
