Well, after the Dreamcast release of Wind and Water: Puzzle Battles we had a short two week vacation which was mostly spent playing games.

Back on the drawing board, we decided to make a “small” game project which we could handle leisurely. So we chose to expand one of our previous projects, namely “Little Ninja” or “Shounin Ryuuhi”, a Ninja platformer.

First of all, I took the original main character and did an overhaul so that he would still be small (which is the idea), but versatile to animate. This is the result:

I haven’t decided on the final look yet, but this is probably what I will stick to.

Also, we decided to make a new “terrain interactive” engine, and we chose the following angles for tiles:

This is because a 45 degree angle is a perfect one-pixel diagonal line, and the other ones are perfect two-pixel diagonal lines. Any other irregular lines will need too much work to look elegant. This is a preliminary tileset to make the map editor a little easier on the eyes.Instead of just “pasting” the character on top of any terrain, we will make him really interact with it. So the little Ninja stands and acts differently depending on the inclination of the plane:

Finally, I made this “Stick Ninja” to test the animation flow and interaction. His name is Chopsticks the Ninja™. Having so much terrain interaction means a LOT of animation on my part. So there goes our “simple” game project…

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 16th, 2008 at 12:35 pm and is filed under Game Design, Little Ninja, Sprite. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.