Aerial_Knight’s Dropshot is a fast-paced, “free-fall-for-all” FPS about falling with style

If it feels like Aerial_Knight’s Dropshot, the latest game from Detroit-based game developer Neil Jones, fell out of the sky earlier this year, you’re not far off from the truth. To hear Jones himself tell it, the fast-paced, stylized FPS game about a sunglasses-wearing sharpshooter sniping adversaries in midair with a literal Finger Gun in a mad dash to secure a lone parachute came about in only a matter of weeks, literally, before going into full production. 

“Last year, when we were wrapping up We Never Yield, me and my friend Daniel Wilkins were just going over ideas,” Jones told me. “Dropshot was one of the ideas he singled out that he thought sounded kind of cool. As soon as we came back in January, I told my team that we were going to make prototypes every two weeks, and this was just one of them.”

From there, Jones and his team sprinted to get a prototype of Dropshot ready in time for the 2025 Game Developers Conference in March. After a glowing reception from those who played the demo, Jones and co. knew that they’d hit onto something. “We took it to GDC, and everybody at GDC who played it loved it, and we just decided this is what we were going to spend the next couple of months on,” he said. 

Part of the appeal of Aerial_Knight’s Dropshot is its unabashed “rule of cool” design philosophy. For example, the decision to equip the player with a Finger Gun in lieu of a more conventional firearm came about after Jones was done modeling the character and thought he looked cooler posing with his fingers instead of holding a gun. The same also applies to the game’s protagonist. Who is he? How did he find himself in this bizarre and perilous predicament? And why does he look so stylish while fighting for his life at such death-defying heights? If there are answers to those questions, Jones certainly isn’t telling.

“He has no backstory,” Jones said. “I just wanted to make a weird character; put a white afro on him, give him shades because, c’mon, you gotta have shades.” Every element of the player character’s design was spontaneous, from the sunflower on his T-shirt—inspired by an episode of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air that Jones was watching while sketching out the initial concept—to the logo on his jacket, which was adapted from the logo of his longtime friend Wilkins.

When asked about the sound design and score for Dropshot, Jones shared that Wilkins, who worked on the soundtrack for 2021’s Aerial_Knight’s Never Yield and last year’s Aerial_Knight’s We Never Yield, passed away a couple of months prior. “This was one of the last things me and him came up with together,” Jones said. “He was really into rock music, so we were going for a really rock-focused sound for it. I don’t have a new audio guy or anything; Dan did all the music for all my games, so we’re just trying to figure it out as we go along.”

Jones hasn’t yet decided whether he wants to incorporate Aerial_Knight’s Dropshot into the larger Never Yield universe. However, if he does decide to do so, he doesn’t want the connection to play to expectations. “I think, by nature, everything I make is kind of connected,” Jones said. “I don’t want to do the whole, ‘Oh, this is part of the same universe.’ I like everything being one-offs, but I’ll probably do an after-credits scene like I always do and make some weird connection.”

In the past, Jones has been reticent when it comes to giving advice on how to break into the games industry or speaking on his experiences as a Black game developer. But in the years since releasing Aerial_Knight’s Never Yield and in the months since Wilkins passed, he’s found himself more willing to open up and share that dimension of himself. 

“I still don’t give advice to people, but during the only talk I've given since Dan passed away, I was just like, ‘Look, if you got something you want to do, just go do it,’” Jones said. “People like to wait a lot, y’know, for the perfect time to do X, Y, and Z. I had the amazing benefit of making two games with my best friend, and I wouldn’t trade anything for that.

“So I would tell people, if you want to do something, especially if you want to do it with somebody you really care about, you should go do that thing. His passing was really, really hard, but the one thing that got me through it was that all he ever wanted to do was make games, and we got to make two really dope games together. His mom is super proud of those games, and she goes back and watches these interviews he did and she’s like, ‘Oh man, I’m so glad people listen to my baby’s music and appreciate what he did’ and things like that. But without that, it would have been way hard. I’m trying to push people to do the things they care about rather than wait.”

Aerial_Knight’s Dropshot is available to wishlist on the Epic Games Store.