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Tag Archives: Ninja Cat
Ninja Cat social additions
Recently I’ve been very busy with making a “social version” of Ninja Cat for Sense Lang. Sense Lang is a typing portal, teaching people how to type faster. They have also typing games, and we cooperate for a long time now, ie. you can play special version of Ninja Cat there.
So, after half a year, today (18.6.2014) I finally finished the project and you can play Ninja Cat with social additions here!
What exactly is changed?
Base additions
First, there is a option to login using social portal (currently Facebook and Twitter) – directly inside game. Thanks to that, you can see your picture next to health bar, and be able to save scores to highscore ladder… which is also displayed directly inside game. This is rather unique feature.
Challenges
Challenges work like this: you select a level and your friend, you play the game, then your score is sent in a invitation to your friend, who can play the same level and try to beat your score. You are informed whether he did it or not, and you both can see your stats (points, accuracy, dinos killed).
That’s pretty cool feature, we predict it can add a lot of fun to game. It will be released in few days also on Sense Lang… and whole internet.… it’s live already, for whole internet. That’s because Read More…
Uuk – word managing tool for Ninja Cat PowerPack
Since sunday I’ve been working on a tool to help me in managing the files with list of words… because I’ve made another change for PowerPack, that is – introduced maturity levels. I called the tool Uuk, which is a name of organgutan librarian in Discworld. Yesterday Uuk reached level at which it can be shown outside, and so I made short video presenting it. Tadam!
It’s a AIR application, which uses minimalcomps for UI. I was timing the implementation, so I know it took me exactly 14h and 23 minutes to make it at this stage.
Why I needed such tool is briefly explained and demonstrated at beginning of above video. Btw, sorry for the bad quality… currently I’d rather work on PowerPack than spend even 3 hours making polished video.
What Uuk allows me to do:
+ easy filter/search for words, in all maturity levels (or a combination of them)
+ add, edit and remove words
+ quickly move words between maturity levels
+ is operated using mouse and keyboard shortcuts
+ autosave of changed words
+ log of changes during program run
What is left to code:
- “show exactly this word” (currently every word search is implicitely *wildcard*)
- case sensitive filtering
- search for duplicates
- full changelog appended to file
- tag support
- multiple languages support (target for future polish version of Ninja Cat)
Except the last two points, all should be quick and easy additions.
Crowdfunding Success!
Yesterday at midnight the Ninja Cat and Zombie Dinosaurs PowerPack project has finished with whooping 130% funding rate from 50 people, collecting almost 3k zlotys! How is this possible, in spite of its problems at beginning?
One of the facts was that the CD Action, biggest polish player magazine, has backed PowerPack and became patron of the game.
The second thing is that the material status has changed, and extension won’t be available online f2p for everyone. At beginning it was meant to be like that, then I changed it for a one month exlusivity period, finally it became forever. So supporting project on wspieram.to was the only chance to get and play PowerPack, which made supporting the project much more sensible option. In the future most likely I’ll be selling the game through digital distribution, but the price is unknown, and for sure there won’t be so many nice bonuses.
There was also an awful lot of promotion. Really, almost all big polish internet game portals have written very positive news about PowerPack crowdfunding; some even few times. Also Krzysztof Gonciarz, PowerPack ambassador has helped a lot. Thanks goes also to wspieram.to for their huge help, and Artifex Mundi for giving out games in combination with mine.
I’ll be preparing a postmortem from this project, because I made many errors and have learned a LOT. Now, I’m finally back to developer work, and in the meantime will be printing the gadgets and sending them to backers.
Ninja Cat PowerPack
EDIT: long story short, here’s epic video which explains everything about game, PowerPack and life. What’s best, it has cats in it!
I’ve been working on it almost a week, with video recording and editing. It has english subtitles so click boldly.
Few days ago I’ve released a crowdfunding project for PowerPack to Ninja Cat. By doing this I want to significantly improve the game. I love it very much, got good reactions from players and game press alike, so it looks like a sensible thing to do :)
Here’s the list of new features that I want to add in PowerPack: Read More…
Level editor design in Ninja Cat, part 1 – inner workings
I’d like to share some of the design concepts applied, and lessons that I learned, while creating and using in-game editor in Ninja Cat. I like reading about how other developers make games, their stories from the trenches – it inspires me, gives knowledge and allows learning on others errors :-P So here is my story for you – how the Ninja Cat editor works, what’s the reasoning behind some of its concepts, and what proved to be good, bad or ugly.
At start, I want to explain how levels look like, so that it will be easier to communicate. It will be rather complete list of all possibilities, because of what I’ve stated – I like reading gory, low level details and think it’s very informative.
How does it work?
When the game is built with editor support (which can be checked using CONFIG::editor directive in AS3), press TAB during game. Then the game gets paused and editor UI appears, as visible on screen.
The editor has 3 modes, changed by pressing 1-2-3 number keys (or clicking on the menu captions on left). I will refer to controls visible in top left corner as main menu.
Trailer for Ninja Cat and interview for Puerto Rican gamers
Recently I’ve been pretty busy with few activities. They were:
Trailer
It came faster than I expected… after one week of sending emails, exchanging ideas and fixing problems… Ladies and Gentlemen, here comes the TRAILER:
It has been created by Michał Friedrich, who’s got much more experience with video editing than I can ever hope.
It made nice splash on polish social sharing site, Wykop. It got there 276 likes, 87 comments, almost 10 thousand views and was featured on the main page. Because of that, YT video also jumped to 4300 views. For me it’s a lot. That sunday I was constantly collecting my jaw from the floor. I love that Ninja Cat finally became exposed to more players.
Interview
Recently I’ve been interviewed by Bay A Pantoja, chemist and owner of Peurto Rican facebook gamer fanpage. Puerto Rico lies in Latin America, but what you won’t learn from Wikipedia is that they have a very strong gamers community there. Mostly Playstation lovers, but recently there’s trend toward PC. You can read it in spanish on their fanapge, and below is the english original:
Bay: Hi Hubert, welcome to our little Facebook page. We have over 2 thousands fans who plays on different platforms, from mobile to PC, and on behalf of them we appreciate that you are dedicating some of your time to us.
A: No problem Bay, I’m happy to participate and come into contact with Puerto-Rican game players … (read the rest of interview)
Ninja Cat – how to play, tips n tricks
Many important informations are given in a tutorial, which automatically starts on a first play. However, for those who didn’t read it, forgot it, or want to know more, here’s the extended tutorial, with additional tips and advices:
First, you are NOT controlling the Ninja Cat directly – he decides where to go. Really, no use in pressing arrows or WASD. There’s no direct jumping or shooting either :) Ninja Cat moves on a path, and you rarely have the chance to change it – see junctions later on.
Your aim is to kill dinosaurs. Type the letters that appear under them, to throw shurikens. The word you need to type is visible under the dinosuar AND at the bottom of screen. After killing you’ll see how much points you’ve made on a flying numbers.
When typing, only correct letters will be entered. Letter case doesn’t matter, so that ninja = NINJA. Also you don’t have to press Enter to finish a word.
Watch your health meter - it’s in the top left corner.
In the bottom right corner you can see a score counter.
There are few rules. You get extra points for killing dinos:
- in a row: evey time you kill another in a short timeframe, combo meter increases. The higher the combo, the more points. You can see it in the bottom right corner of screen.
- with a style: fast and accurate typing will be much pointa-flous (I’m inventing words) than slow and sloppy
- at short distance – Katana kills give 30 points flat
Your points are taken for … (read the rest of tips)
Ninja Cat and Zombie Dinosaurs – postmortem
Here I want to share some details about my first indie commercial game (you can play it here).
Fun facts:
- It took me 8 months (starting July 2012) to create it and another one to sell it.
- I created half a meg of AS3 source code.
- I made everything by myself, including code, design and graphics.
- I used free sounds from the internet, and music from Kostya Dolgushyn
- I made one week prototype in C++, with my old engine Sculpture Clay 2
- I used Mercurial for version control
- Game folder on hard drive takes 1.5 GB, even though the game compiles to 2.7MB
- What you learn from this game is that triceraptops attacks its enemies by falling behind them from the sky.
What went right
1. Final game Quality
I really took time and effort to make as best game as possible. So it looks nice, is fun, original and polished (of course I’m not objective). What else one could want? Perhaps that other people would react to it positively and like playing :)
Indeed I did a lot of tests in real life, with people from different backgrounds: hardcore players, casual players, and no-players. Over 95% speak about the game positively. You can see the (almost) full list of testers and feedback givers in game credits.
I was doing those tests from the very beginning. As soon as I had a first working prototype in Flash, Read More…
Digital Dragons 2013
Digital Dragons is a new polish game industry festival that took part in 19-20 April in Krakow. Organised by Krakow Technological Park, it started last year as a 2-2.5 times smaller, nonetheless successfull. This year it was again a closed event, only to people from the industry and press. Here’s a short relation from yours truly :)
I was there for two days, almost from the very beginning to the very end, and was given one computer from organisers to show Ninja Cat and Zombie Dinosaurs as part of Indie showcase. My motivation? I went to Digital Dragons mostly to show my game, listen to some lectures and panels, network a bit and perhaps find an investor/sponsor. And so to attract attention I was wearing custom and totally awesome Ninja Cat T-shirt. Other 2 T-shirts were printed for my girlfriend and father :)
I was also giving out little stickers with my game’s logo. I got 7 and given around 11 bussiness cards – which is something new, since at other gd events that I visited so far (IGK, WGK, GameDay, ZTG, KrakJam, Mrroczne Sekrety Tworcow Gier Komputerowych) I was exchanging around zero bussiness cards. Maybe it’s because of me, my different role or the event – perhaps all. Anyway, I made a few nice contacts that way.
People who were playing my game Read More…
