A Time to Build: Of Ninjas and Demons

3:10 PM on 11.27.2008   |   Snake726

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[Editor's note: Snake726 talks about a game he made for a class project for his A Time to Build Monthly Musing. -- CTZ]

While I was attending VFS, I was able to produce two games with my team, so I thought I'd share my favourite here. In fact, we liked it so much that it was often what we would play while taking breaks in the middle of the night from working on our final project, which was an Unreal Tournament 3 mod. I thought about discussing the final project but decided against it. I love both games and there are interesting stories about both, but the first game was made in Flash which means a) it feels more complete and b) you can download it and play it and the end of this. So I think that makes for a good blog-type story.

Hit the jump to find out how this game came about and to try it out for yourself.

It all began in our Flash class. The idea was to learn how to prototype a game concept and develop some, I don't know, 'team dynamics' and whatnot. It was to be our practice swing before stepping up to the plate, and because of that our schedule was four weeks. We would have about four months of development time on the final project. We had sat in on some presentations from the class before us and had seen very rough games or tech demos, so we weren't sure what to think. None of us, in our six man team, had ever made an entire game before. We had a competent 2D artist, a fledgling 3D artist, my roommate who was just learning to script, a project manager, a sort of all-rounder who had some QA experience, and myself who had experience with UI art and game documentation. None of us were very sure of our skills, but we knew one thing: we were going to blow the last class out of the water. We didn't know how, but we wouldn't sleep until we did.

So we started brainstorming and with six people, this can be extremely difficult. You have to sort of dance around each other, shooting down ideas but trying not to offend anyone; which is hard when people are so passionate. Ever the pragmatist, I think I did my share of buzz killing. After a few hours, all of us scattered around our project manager's apartment, we came to a conclusion: the easiest thing to do with such a small game was to make a platformer. Plus, our final project was going to be an FPS, so we saw the need to diversify.

We played around with several big ideas. One idea was to make a sort of Shadow of the Colossus inspired platformer. The background would be this huge colossus and parts of his body would serve as platforms; the player would have to dodge giant fists and try to hang on. We thought on that for quite a while, still sitting in the apartment. There was very little talking as everyone tried to imagine what it would be like, trying to find any flaws or gems in the design. But weeks earlier I had been turned onto a Flash game by an acquaintance in the industry, and somehow I ended up moving from the living room onto a PC and started playing it, just thinking to myself. It was an Orisinal game and it was called Winterbells -- the player is a little rabbit who must bound up bells; a simple vertical platformer which was charming and incredibly challenging and addictive. So I proposed we take the idea of a vertical platformer and put our own spin on it. We put the Colossus idea on the back burner and attacked this new idea. What would the theme be?

The head of the game design department had said several times that he didn't want to see any zombie, pirate, or ninja games. So we immediately decided that the main character would be a ninja. We decided it would be somewhat violent, but in a funny way. In class we had been told that the newer term for pre-production demos was "vertical slice"; the idea being that you create one tiny part of a game and polish it to show what the end product could be. So we settled on the title, Vertical Slice. This game would have its tongue firmly planted in its cheek. But we were still uncomfortable that we were ripping off Winter Bells. If we were going to sleep at night, we had to change the formula enough to make it different, but we had to change it for the better rather than alter it just so it seemed different.

Yes, this is the extent of my artistic abilities; a cobbled together sword, a makeshift rising sun, and an ink blot. Gets the job done.

Our 3D artist, who was the cousin and roommate of our project manager, was -- and is still -- the most hardcore gamer I know. It's not that he spends any more time playing games, he just loves to play punishing games. He plays Ninja Gaiden on the hardest difficulties and doesn't get angry, he plays until he wins. So we decided that we would make the game harder in some way, but make it easy for people to try again. Like street chemists in a meth lab, we were doing our best to come up with an addictive formula -- one we would test on ourselves first. It took a few days, but after pondering on some ideas we thought about this: in Winterbells the player just jumps from bell to bell and as long as they hit the next bell they're propelled upwards, like a sort of automated jump; the way the game got harder over time was by making the bells smaller and placing them farther apart. It seemed to be an algorithm because it wasn't exactly the same every time -- we would remember that for later. So we thought that we would make it harder in a different way. We would have enemies with shields or weapons that would deflect the player's jump, slowing down the game a bit but adding more strategy. One enemy would block jumps from the left, one from the right, one from below, and one of the enemies would just stand there and wait to get sliced, acting just like a bell in Winterbells. This would change the game significantly, so we were happy with ourselves and started to get to work.

Initially the enemies were going to be ninjas as well, and the player would be comically jumping up a tree (ala Crouching Tiger) for the entire level, fighting off falling ninjas. But the more we pictured it the more it seemed that the enemies needed to stand out more. So drawing from our somewhat Oriental theme we decided on demons. Props to our artist because that's all he got -- draw a demon and see what it looks like. After a few minutes he had a rough sketch and about a day later he had the final enemy design. Because we had so much 2D work to do, our 3D artist took on the task of designing and animating our main character ninja, while our 2D guy would draw the enemies, their death animations, the background, and our ingame menu screen (which would be at the base of the tree, where the player would fall when he failed). And so with our 2D guy locked away at home -- where he worked best -- and our 3D guy doing his best at learning how to draw and animate a character in 2D, I started to draw up a level design document. It seemed like our idea was so simple that a full design document would be unnecessary, so we didn't make one. Rebels, us.

Our scripter had been talking to our Flash teacher and knew that our enemies would be put into arrays. What this meant was we would have our enemy types assigned to different numbers and called into the array at the positions we wanted them to be drawn on the screen. Which was good, because we could design wave formations ahead of time and just copy them in. So we came up with some different tricks to throw at the player; the gauntlet, the chain, and we organized them into difficulty levels. It would start out with easy formations and as the player moved on he would graduate to more insane combinations. Oh, and we decided we would add power-ups as well. Power-ups started off as another 'We're different from Winterbells' idea, but we soon realized we really needed it, because we had a problem. We feared that the game was too hard, and the player didn't get far enough before restarting. Our scipter was having trouble with producing a complete jumping mechanic, so this was still all in our heads. We said, 'Why don't we use the mouse a bit more?' and so we thought, maybe the player could left click and jump, but only a limited number of times. The easiest way to track such a thing was with a power-up. So in the final product the player can collect a ninja star (crudely designed by yours truly), of which he can carry three at any one time, which allows him to click the mouse and jump in midair. We also added a second lotus flower power-up that adds points, just so the ninja star didn't feel lonely.

This brings us to the next issue which still makes our team, when assembled, produce big toothy grins. Our department head had written in one of my documents for his design document class that nobody plays for points any more. This blew my mind and caused me to mockingly quote it to everyone I saw. So it was no surprise that not only was our game going to contain ninjas and have a snarky name, it would also be all about points.

Sensei will offer words of, err...encouragement. We take no responsibilty for the atrociously offensive accent.

Fast forward about a week before our delivery date and our Flash teacher is giving us timid smiles -- where is our game? All we have to show him is a little programmer art ninja bouncing on a cube as leaves fall down the screen (some guys on the team were obsessed with getting leaves to fall, and it was surprisingly one of the first things in the game). He's very concerned. We laugh nervously. We know everything will come together ... but we've never done this before, so will it? Who knows? I had produced a level template for everyone so we could all make levels, and everyone had quickly made a bunch. I had been tinkering with a theme for our menus, a rising sun motif, ink blots, and a sword for our logo. I'm a horrible artist but I know what looks good, and I know my way around Photoshop well enough. But it still looked rough, and it didn't look like much.

The other three groups were nearly done: a hex based cat/mouse game, a Pac-Man-like maze game, and a first person dog sledding game (yes, it was hilariously awesome). And here we were with a scrolling bamboo forest and a ninja bouncing on a square with leaves falling on him. And so we tightened our belts and we held a sort of emergency meeting. Everyone was already a bit jittery from lack of sleep -- we were working a lot, but we weren't producing much. Tensions were high and we had to tiptoe around emotions. We had a few days left until we not only had to submit the game, but we would have to present it as well. One of our team members was already working on the presentation slides. We decided to play a dangerous game -- we would not get any significant amount of sleep until the game was done, and we were going to stay at school together and work the whole time. Maybe we would be zombies when the presentation came around, but so be it. We would have the game there to back us up.

And so on the last day our scripter finally got everything working. I madly converted everyone's templates into the array format in Notepad and put it on the shared drive. I was creating rollover buttons for menu items that we were making up on the fly. Our 2D guy was with us and he had done an amazing job with the enemies, and had a fully coloured background. He had drawn the scrolling background in such a way that the bamboo all locked together and would scroll well. We had to change the enemy colours so they would stand out more but that was a simple task in Photoshop. Our 3D guy had produced an amazing ninja and a plethora of little animations. We had worked hard on getting all the frames right for the slicing animation. One thing you learn when you write documents for a team -- nobody reads them, they skim them. So we no longer had difficulty levels, we would just have to juggle what we had. Some team members had produced ridiculously difficult levels -- especially one we called 'The Flying T' which appeared rather early on. But we had no time to balance anything, so that's the way it would be. We locked down the build. That was it, this was our game. We loaded the final version onto a USB stick and retreated to our project manager's apartment. Most of the team slept on the couches but a few of us stayed up all night playing the game. To our surprise, it allowed us to stay awake and be full of information for the presentation.

Like a moth to a flame, you will always throw yourself into these red guys. It's science.

And so we shuffled in, to our Flash teacher's surprise, with a game. I don't think he could really believe it. We appeared to be a mess of a team with no organization and no attention span, making a derivative game about ninjas. But nobody could stop playing it, and I must have been grinning from ear to ear all morning. In the presentation we blew everyone away -- this I can say honestly; I'm usually a modest guy. But we blew them away. No longer was the bar set at producing little tech demos in Flash, our class had all created entire playable games, and I stand by the fact that ours stole the thunder that morning. We got feedback forms back from the audience -- some people were upset that I had referred to our downwards pointing enemy as "an asshole", but screw them, those red guys are sons of bitches that always knock you down. We presented first, and so I collapsed in a theatre seat (we had a big movie theatre to present in, as it was a film school) and zoned out for the next hour. Then I went home and slept the good sleep.

The game is a quick download below if you'd like to call my bullshit. It really is fun, and even though it's quite unfinished and unpolished, I love it.

http://student.vfs.com/~gd09nick/image/Vertical%20Slice%20V1.exe