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…

Hi everyone!

As you probably noticed, Wind and Water: Puzzle Battles for Dreamcast was released early this month, so we decided to start a new simple platform-adventure game, codename: Little Ninja!

Since Wind and Water was a very extensive and ambitious project, we want to keep this one simple. We’re mostly focusing on engine development, programming, scripting, as well as graphical issues that need to be resolved. Little Ninja may become the stage for our new big platform/adventure project, but for now, we’ll try to keep it simple, and we really hope this time we don’t mess it up We’ll be documenting the whole development process, both from my side (programming), as well as the artistical and musical part — Yuan’s part.

What is Little Ninja anyway?

少忍龍飛 (Shounin Ryuuhi — Young Ninja Ryuuhi) is an old Yuan Works project:

That’s an old screenshot taken from the Yuan Works website. We’ll be remaking it from scratch, but the basic idea still applies.

Map Editor and Tile Design

Before starting to program directly on the game, there are several tools that need to be done beforehand. Fortunately, all animation and image editors used for our past project were dramatically improved while we were working on Wind and Water, however, one of the tools that is not too flexible is W&W’s map editor:

Wind and Water does feature a map (usually compared to Super Mario Bros 3), but we need something more complex this time. It’s time to design a map editor then!

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Hi everyone,

The wait is over! The Dreamcast version of Wind and Water: Puzzle Battles will be released by the end of October, and preorders are running now. Head to the W&W website for more information! The game can be preordered at our publisher redspotgames’ webshop.

We have also opened the official W&W Forums where we will be adding information about the preordering, the release date, and future shops that will carry the game, so don’t forget to register and check it out!

Hi everyone,

We’d like to let you know that Wind and Water: Puzzle Battles for the Dreamcast will be released on Summer 2008! We’ve updated our website with the announcement, you can check it out here. The sprite ordering for Dreamcast will be available for two weeks starting now and will be very limited, so be sure to grab yours as soon as possible! The game will be available for preorder in the following weeks, and will be published by redspotgames.

New packaging and design

The game will feature an extensive manual in both Japanese and English, as well as new artwork and design for the packaging:

New features for the Dreamcast version

For those familiar with the GP2X version, we’ve added tons of new features,  including: the new Mr. VMU character and dialogues, the new Danger Break system, faster and more accurate gameplay, new Computer Difficulty Levels, fully dual-language packaging and game software (English and Japanese), new artwork and design for the Manual and Packaging, a new ending, rebalanced 2-player battles, tons of new graphics, high-quality CD Soundtrack music with new songs, arcade stick support for the Dreamcast, and much more (but we don’t want to spoil everything)!

Don’t forget to check the new website!

After months of intensive work, a Demo of Wind and Water: Puzzle Battles for the Dreamcast will be released on June 6th, on the German Retro Magazine, Issue # 8, with the help of redspotgames, the publisher of the Dreamcast title Last Hope.

The Demo will be included on a Dreamcast bootable disk and, as the GP2X Demo version, the Dreamcast demo includes two complete Story Mode worlds, 2 Puzzle Mode Stages, and some other stuff. Don’t forget to insert a VMU with at least 4 Free Blocks!

(Oh, and don’t forget to subscribe to our RSS feed to keep in touch with the latest news about the development of W&W for the Dreamcast!)

In our last post, we talked a little about W&W’s origins. Today, I’ll post a little bit on how the graphics were created for Wind and Water: Puzzle Battles!

As we all know, the resolution of the GP2X is 320*240 pixels, and though it may sound like a very limited resolution by today’s standards, it houses no less than 76800 dots of pure workload. The reason is that sprite graphics have dots hand placed carefully to make everything look pretty and well animated.

For the graphics, as always, everything goes by the “rule of eights” with me. I already knew that the “Elements” in the game would be 16×16, so all I needed was to make them colorful and to include the appropriate Chinese character inside. Chinese characters are pretty complicated compared to letters in say, English, and sometimes squeezing the whole ideogram in a limited space can be quite a challenge!

At first, they were going to be more “classic” in style. The characters were more calligraphic and the blocks much flatter. Later, I imagined them as cubes, so I had to play with the lighting to give them volume. I wanted the blocks to fade according to the element they represented, so I drew the bursting animations.

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So, how did this game come to be?

Hao and I had always wanted to make a puzzle game. But we wanted something a little more ambitious than ones currently available. We wanted one that had a very strong and competitive two player mode. One where skill, practice of difficult moves, and strategy would dictate the winner, much like in a good fighting game. On the other hand, we also wanted to include a story mode unlike anything ever seen in a puzzle game before.

The Story Mode of this game is perhaps its most original feature

We already knew the basics that we wanted: a game with combos and chains. Combos that could be constructed with speed and planning. And chains that didn’t happen by chance, but rather by skill. Also, we didn’t want anything precipitating all the time from the top of the screen. We wanted to have the whole board available from the very beginning to let players start making strong moves right away.

But what did we feel was missing from other puzzle games in terms of gameplay?

One of the greatest puzzle games ever made!

Hexic was too much based on strategy, which made it a little slow for action battles. Bejeweled had nice chains, but it was hard to set them up even with skills. Super Puzzle Fighter II X (Turbo) had a big percentage of chance going on: even great players sometimes lost matches because of bad luck. Panel de Pon (Tetris Attack) had an overall excellent battle system, but combos and other moves became rather useless to experienced players, who rely exclusively on chains, of which you eventually run out.

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We refer to the traditional pixel graphics that compose many of the elements in 2D games, such as Wind and Water: Puzzle Battles, as sprites. Sorry, no soft drinks!

(If you order Wind and Water: Puzzle Battles you can choose to have a custom W&W style sprite character based on you! You just need to send us a picture of yourself!)

What’s so special about a sprite?

A sprite requires the unusual skill to be able to draw using little squares with resolution and color restrictions. Sadly, this skill is deteriorating greatly in the West, and there are very few people who can still produce high quality pixel art there. The recently released Contra 4 and upcoming Noitu Love 2 by Joakim Sandberg are excellent examples (so be sure to support projects like these if you love this art)!

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Hi everyone! We’re finally back from the GDC 2008 at San Francisco with lots of photos.

The IGF and GDC Awards Ceremony

All in all, we’re very grateful with the chance that was given to us by the IGF Comitee as a finalist. We were able to meet many experts from at the latest trend in video-games, as well as experts from the industry, including staff from Konami, Square-Enix, Capcom, Namco-Bandai, and many others.

Read the rest of the article for more photos and lessons learned from the GDC!

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Hi everyone, sorry for the big delay. We’ve been really busy running from one building to another, setting up the booth, well you already know.

We have good news! I’ve finally uploaded some pictures about the GDC (Game Developers Conference) 2008 held in San Francisco, where we were invited to attend to as an IGF Mobile Finalist.

Anyway, enough talk, on to the pictures!

The Wind and Water: Puzzle Battles Stand! We were making some tests today (Tuesday), the conference starts tomorrow at 10AM, and W&W is looking great

Heres a picture we took of the Moscone Center West on Sunday, while it was still closed. The main conference (where we are located) is at the Moscone North.Read the rest of the entry for more pictures!

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