**The Development and Design of Drop Zone**

As we delve deeper into the world of competitive gaming, it's essential to understand the core mechanics and gameplay that make a game truly engaging. In the case of Drop Zone, a strategic first-person shooter with MOBA elements, our team has poured immense effort into crafting an experience that caters to players of all skill levels.

One of the most significant aspects of Drop Zone is its ability system, which offers three levels of progression: Level 1, Level 2, and Level 3. Each level brings with it a new set of abilities and playstyles, allowing players to customize their experience and adapt to the game's ever-changing landscape. As we discussed earlier, our core gameplay revolves around collecting points within a time limit – in this case, 15 minutes – with the player accumulating the most points declared the winner.

However, there are several other ways to score points, making Drop Zone an incredibly dynamic and engaging experience. For instance, players can destroy enemy hives, which contain alien energy artifacts known as cores. These cores can be picked up by a pilot, who then right-clicks on them and attaches them to their back. The core is then transported to the center of the map, where it's placed in an uplink, earning the player points. This system is often referred to as the "sports ball" analogy, where players must navigate the map, collect cores, and place them in the uplink to score.

Another crucial aspect of Drop Zone is its use of vision objectives, which rotate randomly around the map. These objectives are tied to specific locations on the map, such as vision towers, and are a critical component of the game's strategic depth. The first player to capture each objective earns points, with additional rewards for achieving multiple objectives simultaneously. This system encourages players to think carefully about their movements and tactics, as controlling these vision towers can significantly impact the overall gameplay experience.

When it comes to competitive play, Drop Zone is well-suited for both 1v1 matches and team-based experiences. Our core game mode is designed to foster intense, high-stakes competition, with players competing in short, 15-minute matches. To support this aspect of the game, we've developed a robust tournament system, complete with ranked play and a built-in platform for hosting events. This will enable teams and players to compete against each other, testing their skills and strategies in a variety of match formats.

In terms of specific gameplay mechanics, our initial map was designed to be more straightforward, with a grid-like layout that allowed players to focus on the core objectives. As we developed the game further, we introduced additional features, such as jump pads and vision towers, which added complexity and depth to the experience. These elements have proven particularly popular among experienced players, who appreciate the challenge of navigating these obstacles and utilizing them to gain an advantage over their opponents.

To support our growing community of competitive players, we're committed to continually updating and refining Drop Zone's features and gameplay mechanics. This will involve regular balance changes, new map releases, and a focus on improving player experience through targeted updates and patches. By listening to feedback from our players and responding with meaningful changes, we aim to create a truly dynamic and engaging experience that rewards skill and strategy.

**The Future of Drop Zone**

In the coming months, we'll be launching open beta for Drop Zone, which promises to bring an influx of new players into the game's ecosystem. To prepare for this milestone, our team has been working tirelessly to ensure that the game is in top shape, with a solid foundation upon which to build.

Our plans for supporting competitive players are already underway, with a focus on developing robust tools and features that cater to their needs. As mentioned earlier, we'll be introducing ranked play, tournaments, and a built-in platform for hosting events, all designed to facilitate high-level competition and provide our community with the resources they need to succeed.

To stay up-to-date with the latest developments in Drop Zone, players can visit our official website at dropzone.com. Here, they'll find links to upcoming patch notes, developer diaries, and other resources that will help them stay informed about the game's ongoing development.

By joining us on this journey, you'll have the opportunity to be among the first to experience Drop Zone in all its glory. With a rich set of gameplay mechanics, a dynamic competitive scene, and a committed team dedicated to player support, we're confident that Drop Zone will become one of the most exciting and engaging games available today.

**Join the Community**

If you're eager to learn more about Drop Zone or get involved with our community, be sure to check out the links provided in the description below. We invite you to join us on this journey into the world of competitive gaming, where strategic thinking, teamwork, and a little bit of luck come together to create an unforgettable experience.

As we wrap up this article, we want to take a moment to thank our community for their ongoing support and enthusiasm. Your energy and dedication are what drive us forward, and we're honored to have you along for the ride. Together, let's build something truly special – Drop Zone is just getting started!

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhey everyone i'm steve from gamers access net and i'm joined by Jason colon from the drop zone team so you showing off this new RTS at PAX West 2016 before getting to drop zone in the coverage this is brought to you by i buy power and the new elements gaming PC which has a large a tempered glass side window and LEDs in the front and bottom so Jason what's the top level overview of drops on what's the basics so the basics are we wanted to make an RTS that we wanted to play in the modern day and so we wanted a game that wouldn't go on for maybe 10 minutes or maybe an hour and a half so we said well can we make it in a finite period of time so in drop zone the games are 15 minutes long there's a very clear way to score points the player with the most points at the end of 15 minutes wins the game if it goes in if it's tied at that point it goes into sudden death overtime first player to score point wins so the other key thing is we want to get the feel of an RTS but we in order to get that time down we had to strip away the base building so what we said is well what have you had a number of units and you had to really pay attention to all of them how many would it take to get that feel of an RTS and we settled on the number of three so in drop zone you're going to take three essentially heroes we call them pilots into the game and those and when you take those in you as the player and a 1v1 game have to control all three finally the other big thing is those heroes you've actually defined all of their abilities by the gear that you put on them so these aren't sure that we have them sort of pre-configured you have some default gear and that's all very viable but you can go and swap out that gear to totally change the way they play so it suits your own style of play right is there is there an effective drafting in this game at all and he drafting pre-match or anything like that yeah so when you go in each of the players is one be one you're going to go in and you're going to choose which of your your pilot's that you've pre-configured you're going to bring in and which of your loadouts so the particular gear configuration that's kind of the unranked mode we have a ranked mode will have where you actually have some trade off you pick your pilot's and then you pick your loadouts and don't likely we're probably going to add some fans and things like that sure how about resource management in drop zone so the real resource in order to level up your pilot's there are these alien creatures and these alien hives you go out and you kill those when you do you get experience I mean that experience allows you to level up it's really important not to fall too far behind the level up curve it's also when you level up a pilot that's going to unlock the gear that you put on them so you've chosen gear that might be a level 3 ability you have to go and unlock that and get that pile it up tall with the level 3 I mean so it's a really important resource is someone else can take those those aliens they can kill them it's a finite resource they can take the XP or you can kind of ignore it and do too many other things and now you're behind the curve and you're losing team fights what are the plans for supporting the more competitive players so I mean I think the game is pretty I mean our core sort of game is 1v1 competitive play we're very competitive group we made it that way from the beginning as far as all the eSports things we can't really make it in eSport but we found that lends itself very well to it in particularly for tournaments we've put in it we've got to put any hooks we can that's supported so we have a built-in tournament system that will be rolling out soon 15-minute matches so you can run a 16-person tournament in an hour really cool each evening to say I'm going to play drop some tournament see how I do so that's sort of thing we have a ranked play that's going to get rolled out before too long until lots of hooks the core experience is very competitive and speaking to the core experience what are some of the core mechanics and gameplay you got a couple different maps right so it's different obviously from the mobo setup but on those maps what's going on we saw one with mind the gap to tell people about that yeah so mind the gap is one that I think new players find it a little bit hard to deal with and people tend to stay on their sides but it's one where it's got a big divide down the middle and then you've got these jump pads it only go one way but people have been playing a while love it and there's a lot of interplay because you can quickly get onto the other side harass the player and then you come down and you jump back the other map that were showing you is kind of a more vanilla our initial map where things are laid out more than a grid and so whenever we have these interesting elements we try to put them in the map or into the gear and not change the core gameplay too much right and the core gameplay as we were saying earlier it's basically collect points within the time limit 15 minutes whoever's got the most wins we talk about a few other ways to get points what about the rest so destroying aliens you pick up the object trip prints of the uplink yeah so the basic way you score and we actually we called the game sports ball when we were first doing it because we were like well let's sort of take that analogy and see how far we can run with it so basically what you're doing is you're going around and finding these hives when you kill the hives they have these these sort of alien energy artifacts which are these cores you they draw up on the ground you can then right click on them with one of your one of your pilot's they'll put them on their back you then take them to the center to the uplink you right click on that you get a channel ability the core goes away in your score points so you can think of it I mean simply as the ball the hoop so the basic mechanic is really clear and that's how you're going to score points the other way you can score with what we call math objectives so these randomly rotate as you go and you see them in draft and they're tied to the map so what happens is the first player to achieve each of those objectives gets the points so for example there these vision towers spread around the map and when you capture one of those vision towers you get this big cone of vision vision is really important in the game that's one of the things we wanted to get back from RTS games it's a sense of map control so that alone is important but for that objective total vision the first player to control all four vision Tower simultaneously gets two points and those objectives tend to pull the action a little bit away from the uplink so if someone's camping the uplink first of all you can go get experience you can level up and go kick them off the uplink and second of all you can go off and really start getting ahead on these secondary objectives very cool what about target released a tentative betas things like that so we're targeting either by end of the year or early next year and that's what we're on track for for open beta okay where should people go to learn more please drop zone com check it out and try to get into the closed beta very cool so play drop zone com for more information and links in the description below as well as always thank you for watching and thank you for joining me we'll see you all next time thank youhey everyone i'm steve from gamers access net and i'm joined by Jason colon from the drop zone team so you showing off this new RTS at PAX West 2016 before getting to drop zone in the coverage this is brought to you by i buy power and the new elements gaming PC which has a large a tempered glass side window and LEDs in the front and bottom so Jason what's the top level overview of drops on what's the basics so the basics are we wanted to make an RTS that we wanted to play in the modern day and so we wanted a game that wouldn't go on for maybe 10 minutes or maybe an hour and a half so we said well can we make it in a finite period of time so in drop zone the games are 15 minutes long there's a very clear way to score points the player with the most points at the end of 15 minutes wins the game if it goes in if it's tied at that point it goes into sudden death overtime first player to score point wins so the other key thing is we want to get the feel of an RTS but we in order to get that time down we had to strip away the base building so what we said is well what have you had a number of units and you had to really pay attention to all of them how many would it take to get that feel of an RTS and we settled on the number of three so in drop zone you're going to take three essentially heroes we call them pilots into the game and those and when you take those in you as the player and a 1v1 game have to control all three finally the other big thing is those heroes you've actually defined all of their abilities by the gear that you put on them so these aren't sure that we have them sort of pre-configured you have some default gear and that's all very viable but you can go and swap out that gear to totally change the way they play so it suits your own style of play right is there is there an effective drafting in this game at all and he drafting pre-match or anything like that yeah so when you go in each of the players is one be one you're going to go in and you're going to choose which of your your pilot's that you've pre-configured you're going to bring in and which of your loadouts so the particular gear configuration that's kind of the unranked mode we have a ranked mode will have where you actually have some trade off you pick your pilot's and then you pick your loadouts and don't likely we're probably going to add some fans and things like that sure how about resource management in drop zone so the real resource in order to level up your pilot's there are these alien creatures and these alien hives you go out and you kill those when you do you get experience I mean that experience allows you to level up it's really important not to fall too far behind the level up curve it's also when you level up a pilot that's going to unlock the gear that you put on them so you've chosen gear that might be a level 3 ability you have to go and unlock that and get that pile it up tall with the level 3 I mean so it's a really important resource is someone else can take those those aliens they can kill them it's a finite resource they can take the XP or you can kind of ignore it and do too many other things and now you're behind the curve and you're losing team fights what are the plans for supporting the more competitive players so I mean I think the game is pretty I mean our core sort of game is 1v1 competitive play we're very competitive group we made it that way from the beginning as far as all the eSports things we can't really make it in eSport but we found that lends itself very well to it in particularly for tournaments we've put in it we've got to put any hooks we can that's supported so we have a built-in tournament system that will be rolling out soon 15-minute matches so you can run a 16-person tournament in an hour really cool each evening to say I'm going to play drop some tournament see how I do so that's sort of thing we have a ranked play that's going to get rolled out before too long until lots of hooks the core experience is very competitive and speaking to the core experience what are some of the core mechanics and gameplay you got a couple different maps right so it's different obviously from the mobo setup but on those maps what's going on we saw one with mind the gap to tell people about that yeah so mind the gap is one that I think new players find it a little bit hard to deal with and people tend to stay on their sides but it's one where it's got a big divide down the middle and then you've got these jump pads it only go one way but people have been playing a while love it and there's a lot of interplay because you can quickly get onto the other side harass the player and then you come down and you jump back the other map that were showing you is kind of a more vanilla our initial map where things are laid out more than a grid and so whenever we have these interesting elements we try to put them in the map or into the gear and not change the core gameplay too much right and the core gameplay as we were saying earlier it's basically collect points within the time limit 15 minutes whoever's got the most wins we talk about a few other ways to get points what about the rest so destroying aliens you pick up the object trip prints of the uplink yeah so the basic way you score and we actually we called the game sports ball when we were first doing it because we were like well let's sort of take that analogy and see how far we can run with it so basically what you're doing is you're going around and finding these hives when you kill the hives they have these these sort of alien energy artifacts which are these cores you they draw up on the ground you can then right click on them with one of your one of your pilot's they'll put them on their back you then take them to the center to the uplink you right click on that you get a channel ability the core goes away in your score points so you can think of it I mean simply as the ball the hoop so the basic mechanic is really clear and that's how you're going to score points the other way you can score with what we call math objectives so these randomly rotate as you go and you see them in draft and they're tied to the map so what happens is the first player to achieve each of those objectives gets the points so for example there these vision towers spread around the map and when you capture one of those vision towers you get this big cone of vision vision is really important in the game that's one of the things we wanted to get back from RTS games it's a sense of map control so that alone is important but for that objective total vision the first player to control all four vision Tower simultaneously gets two points and those objectives tend to pull the action a little bit away from the uplink so if someone's camping the uplink first of all you can go get experience you can level up and go kick them off the uplink and second of all you can go off and really start getting ahead on these secondary objectives very cool what about target released a tentative betas things like that so we're targeting either by end of the year or early next year and that's what we're on track for for open beta okay where should people go to learn more please drop zone com check it out and try to get into the closed beta very cool so play drop zone com for more information and links in the description below as well as always thank you for watching and thank you for joining me we'll see you all next time thank you\n"