On Sunday (14th of August) I tweeted that I had this neat little idea in my head for a mobile game, and I was going to work on it for the day. At that point I thought nothing more of it. But by the Monday afternoon I already had a little working prototype.

The game lovingly titled “Don’t Go Bang” is a simple game about diffusing different bombs over a series of levels. As always, the instructions start off simple and easy, and progressively get more difficult, forcing you to think and use what you know to complete the task at hand.

It begins with a flashing screen with the name of the game (don’t worry, I’m going to add a little button that just says “Tap” so players don’t wait for it to finish.)

And when you Tap the screen, the Start Menu appears.



Well actually it animates into place. The logo begins to fall away (it’s all layered) and falls into the background and is dimmed a little so as not to be too noisy on the eye. A vignette appears around the edge to help capture the tension of the game, and your diffuser rank and requisition points are shown. Diffuser rank is just your experience counter based on how many bombs you’ve diffused and how well you did them (there are point modifiers + medals etc)

Then you have your requisition points, these are points you can spend on powerups, ranging from slowing down time, to help + tips. Options currently just resets your save data (for easiness from the developers point of testing) and exit pops up a menu to be sure you want to exit.) And when you click start, the screen fades to white, and this new menu appears.

Each level appears listed here, and you can scroll with your finger left and right to see more levels. Although only six are shown are here that is literally because I have six fully working levels so far (not bad for five and a half days.). If you click on a level, a new pop up scales into view.

It shows the level, some stats about it (currently not lots of info included), you best time you diffused the bomb in, the best medals you achieved, and a small piece of text that’s relevant to the level. I went for a dark and cheeky humour for the game (which you’ll see later) and it’s how your told the story and instructions for bomb diffusal. When I say story as well, there is none, it’s just a device used to explain why you’re in a room with bombs.

And when you click play, you’re presented with a bomb.



I tried to capture exactly what happens at the beginning of each level. The bomb has a cover over it, which is unscrewed automatically and the cover is slid off screen (you can see it almost off screen now, but don’t worry it is fully off the bomb while you’re playing.) You can see the instructions in the top left as well. Originally, this was just to stay there and be updated. But on maybe the third day, I decided to make it so that the instruction fades away after a few seconds, forcing you to pay attention at the beginning and remember it for the duration. As the bombs grow more difficult, you may be given more/additional instructions, but for now it’s a single one.

The timer flashes and the noises are abuzz to add tension to the gameplay. When I talked earlier about the dark humour, I was thinking specifically of what happens when you fail. Let’s suppose I cut the wrong wire, the bomb exploded and white fills the screen, when it fades away, you’re presented with this.

The screen looks broken, your shouted at for breaking the one rule of the game (Don’t Go Bang) and you have a little joke phrase poking fun at your failure on the right. Not going to lie, some of them get pretty dark. Here are some other examples.

The astute of you will notice the text’s position is a little different in each picture, it’s because it bobs closer and further away to the screen just to taunt you even more. I loved writing some of these, especially the darker ones (I’ve hid them for the sake of suspense.)

But let’s assume you succeed – You’ll get this:

(The screenshot below was actually taken using the camera icon you can see. I tried to catch the animation of the medals sliding into place.)

Here you get your passing mark (success at one medal) and then it displays your time when you diffused it. If you look really close you’ll see the timer is still stopped in the background which I thought was a nice touch. The progress to your next diffuser rank is then shown and you’re options to continue etc. From here on the top left you’ll see that you can also take a screenshot and also share it with your connected friends etc. I’ll put this on the fail screens as well but it’s been a busy week so far.

And at that point that’s it. You’ll have nine levels, and then a really difficult bomb on the tenth. The background will change as you’re placed to diffuse a live bomb instead so you’ll be in a warzone potentially. When you complete that particularly difficult bomb you’ll be given greater rewards/rank/powerups and then the process starts over again with a new ten levels.

Super simple, but so addicting so far. Every new prototype I’ve tried, people seem to love it, but what do you think? Please let me know here or @DalriadaConnor.

The future for Don’t Go Bang? – Continue making more bombs now that I have a strong framework for everything else (level select etc), add in powerups, leaderboards, and then drum roll… daily challenges! Yeah now that I know how much fun I’ve been having making and playing this, I’m going to add a new mode – where you must train by playing the levels provided (I want there to be loads) and then you’ll have daily + weekly + monthly events were you have extremely difficult bombs you have to diffuse. These will literally have timers up to five/ten mins and be super intense.