Parachute Panic

FDG Entertainment

Guide your parachutists safely into the boats – but watch out! Helicopters, hungry sharks, lightning bolts, and the occasional UFO are out to ruin your day.

With its charming hand-drawn notebook style and quirky comic animations, every crash landing becomes an entertaining spectacle. Catchy acapella tunes and playful sound effects round out this addictive pick-up-and-play experience.

Working with sole ownership across the full visual scope of the project, I developed the creative strategy and visual identity from the ground up — with a sense of fun and personality as a core requirement. That identity was extended across character design, illustration, animation, and in-game assets, while the user interface layout and sequencing were shaped to ensure the experience felt cohesive, intuitive, and enjoyable at every step. Beyond the visual work, I contributed directly to the game concept itself.

With every creative decision made and executed independently, the final stage was a clean, well-documented handoff — delivering production-ready assets and comprehensive style guides to the third-party development team, leaving no room for misinterpretation between the design intent and the finished build.

A selection of screens from the game.

A key component of the game was to have a dynamic hand-drawn animation style, even on static imagery. As such, every 1 image in the game actually consisted of 2 images, with a slight difference between them, which was constantly cycled through in order to achieve the scribbly wobbly effect.

This effect was applied on the hand-drawn menu UI elements as well, to give the same effect to titles and buttons too.

Making sure that all the in-game character illustrations would work as expected when animated required extensive testing.
Use the PREV and NEXT buttons to cycle through them.

A selection of early process work, exploring sketches, typography studies, and app screen flows.

Recognition

Featured by Apple on all the iPods in their prestigious (brick-and-mortar) retail stores as a playable demo game to promote the iPod to customers.
Peaked at position no. 1 on the iTunes App Store, Top Paid Apps chart (all categories, not just Games) in some international stores.
Peaked at position no. 1 on the iTunes App Store, Top Free Games chart (lite/demo version of the game).
Featured by Apple (not paid-for) on the App Store in the following categories:
- In The Spotlight
- Best Doodle Games
- New And Noteworthy
- What We're Playing
- Hand-picked Promotional Banner advertising section

It’s a real “blink and you’ll miss it” moment, but eagle-eyed viewers might spot the Parachute Panic icon (as well as the icon for Mr Mahjong, another game I worked on) appears on the iPhone of Red Mist, a character in the Hollywood movie Kick-Ass, starring Nicolas Cage, Chloë Grace Moretz, and Christopher Mintz-Plasse.