Tag Archives: Postmortem

Level editor design in Ninja Cat, part 1 – inner workings

by on 3 August 2013 in Technology

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.

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Ninja Cat and Zombie Dinosaurs – postmortem

by on 8 May 2013 in Games, Technology

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.

Ninja Cat menu

I was doing those tests from the very beginning. As soon as I had a first working prototype in Flash, Read More…