Working on a new game - Ice Cream Man

It’s been a while since I’ve tried making a game. I write little ideas down in my notebook here and there, snippets or ideas that I think might be fun to do something with, but it’s been I think two years since I’ve made a finished game, my last one being Monarch’s Flight for the NES. So I was pretty excited when a while back I got an idea in my head, and started playing around with a concept in Gdevelop.

The idea started off as an homage to Paperboy, a game I used to love playing on the NES back in the day, and still enjoy firing up for a few rounds every now and then. In this game, you’ll play an ice cream truck driver whose truck is out of control and won’t stop. However, you’ve decided to still deliver your ice cream. You’ll have to toss ice cream out the left and right of the truck and try to hit the kids waiting for it. Different kids will want different types of ice cream, so you’ll need to scroll through a few different options and make sure you get them the right treat! And of course in Paperboy fashion, there will be a variety of obstacles in your way, from the more mundane, like junk in the road or people crossing the street while blindly looking at their phones, to the more wacky, like UFOs floating in to blast lightning bolts.

Pretty much every game I’ve made so far has been small and simple, as I’m just making them in my spare time and don’t have a lot of experience. But something like Paperboy is a really fun game that is pretty small, I think it only has 1 level for each day of the week, and then it repeats. My hope is to have several levels that are around the same size as Paperboy’s and maybe a bonus level of some kind. Right now I’ve got a lot of the mechanics working in a demo level, I’ve started building out level one. All placeholder graphics and no music or sound, so those will all come later. But it’s coming along, and I’m excited to work on a new game.