DragCore Mechanics

     You may be a bit curious as to what DragCore gameplay is like, so I'll show what I wrote in the design document. These are based the mechanics that I had in the prototype I made in 11th grade. I altered them a bit to better fit a long lasting mobile game broken into small pieces rather than the endless arcade style game I originally planned. Some are subject to change as the final product starts to evolve, but it's basically what I'm going for.

Take a look at the stuff DragCore does.

Game Mechanics

Tapping – tap an enemy to make it explode. This makes a small electrical explosion where the user taps, whenever the user taps. Before a grid is activated, the explosion is spawned at the central point of finger contact. Because of multi-touch it is possible to fend off lots of enemies and develop personal techniques. With each increase in combo level, the explosion of the tap is bigger. The explosion instantly kills enemies on impact.

Drag Box – This creates an electrical field around enemies in a way similar to dragging a box on a desktop computer screen. When the player lifts the finger shaping the box, the box disappears and the enemies are destroyed with fierce electrical fury. Only one box can be drawn at once. Its size is dictated by the origin point and the player’s touch position. If it reaches a maximum size, it cannot grow and follow the players finger outward anymore in the overextended direction, but can move otherwise. For example, if X is maxed out and touch position is out of bounds, if touch’s y changes to within range, the box adjusts accordingly. Boxes cannot overlap Earth.

Crystals – Crystals unlock game levels and features. They are earned by filling the crystal meter with points earned from beating challenges. More difficult challenges yield more points. With each crystal earned, the next is harder to acquire as the crystal meter requires more and more points in order to be filled. 

Once a certain number of crystals are earned (enough to unlock everything), the meter remain full, the counter displays zero, and acquired points no longer have value.

Combos – Popping a multitude of enemies in a small time-span increases a combo rating. The values are 1-4, red, blue, green, and yellow respectively. 

Each color increases the maximum size of the grid (drag box) with red being the smallest and yellow covering most of the screen. If a certain amount of time passes without killing a set number of enemies (based on current color) the combo rating goes down by one. Example: you have a blue grid, if you keep killing 10 enemies within 3 seconds you stay blue, if you get less, you reduce to red, but if you get 5 you upgrade to green.

Game Center – Players unlock achievements and post challenge scores to leaderboards. It adds depth, competiveness, and extended value to the game.

Game Modes – There are multiple ways the Earth can behave. Static normal size, static large size, moving normal size, or movable normal size via multi-touch.

Enemy behaviors:

Red – Spawn, head toward Earth

Blue – Smaller, 2 times faster

Yellow – Bigger, 3 times faster, never changes course

Green – Smaller, Dodges by going exact opposite direction it was heading until x or y are 100px away from grid origin point. When dodging it goes 2 times faster

Orange – 2 times faster, Dodges like green but goes in random direction. When dodging goes 4 times faster than red.

Purple – Smaller, 2 times faster, Teleports to near edge of the screen

Black – Teleports to exact opposite side of screen. If going SE, NW, up, or down, teleports  to opposite y value.

White – Box in to reveal another randomized color