It’s done! It took longer than the alloted time by quite a bit, not to mention I massively cheated (about half the final code is from existing work, not new). But it’s fun, in a weird and weird, weird way. It’s a goofy game. But it’s got skills and leveling up, so that makes it good. it’s also very hard with most of the maps I found, but they all seem winnable if you got ninja skillz.

Enjoy Ninja Kitty’s neverending battle against the horrid Nukebots.

Download: Windows EXE (660kb)

Here’s a screen! You can’t actually get hurt yet, but I can tell it’s nearly impossible so far. Kitty is a ninja in the shinobi style - that means he can teleport dash through the air freely. And he clings to walls and ceilings and throws stars. The only controls are left mouse to dash to cursor, and right mouse to throw stars.

Nukebots, of course, contain nuclear explosives inside. So killing one will cause an explosion that will hopefully help you, but might kill you too. And all those yellow blips are the absurd amount of firepower the robots currently have. They also have way too much life, or you do way too little damage. The color of the Nukebot tells you its abilities. The less green it has, the faster it moves, the less red, the more life, the less blue, the faster it shoots (I know less is weird, but there’s logic to it, I think).

This design supports absolutely any colors you want, not just the official ones! Of course, black=walls, white=space, and FF00FF=player start. But other than that, it’s all robots. And those big colorful blocks make for an awful lot of robots.

I was quite pleased with how this one worked out, The game only has three levels and I was quite worried that the last level might be impossible. As time was running out on the clock I was trying to figure out if it could be done, I finally got a single ninja home and went “that’s it! ship it!”.

playing post compo I actually managed to figure out how to get all of the ninja home on that level by using a few tricks.

I also liked the look of Teeny Tiny Ninja. I got the stars idea from a previous Bluescrn entry. Adding a bunch of stars does indeed liven up the look of things. Also The ninja home came out surprisingly well for programmer art. I thought the sound worked well too, but the scores the game got suggested I was in the minority. when a ninja goes ‘Hut!’ every time he jumps it’s cool, but people found it less so when there were a couple of hundred Ninja doing it, serves themselves right for picking swarms as the theme I say.

The game used a homebrew physics engine made during the 48 hours. this worked quite nicely, Ninja were all implemented as tiny triangles

See. There was no Line to object collision detection so it was possible for Ninja to get stuck on corners by impailing themselves on a point and having their triangle points go either side. There were alsdo a few other little quirks that caused th ninja to get stuck. The solution worked brilliantly. I checked to see if a ninja hadn’t moved for a while and if so just added a huge random vector to its movement. A lot of people took this to be an intentional behaviour because it looked very ninja like. sometimes a ninja would jump to a wall or point and stick there for a bit then jump away again.

Once again the controls were a bit unintuitive. But I thought the use of a mousewheel worked well.

Download the game

LD48 #8 theme was “Swarms”. It also occurred right around the initial release of the Nintendo Wii. Thus, you get Wee Ninja, a game where you are trying to beat an insanely large horde of other shoppers to the last remaining Wees in stock during the holiday season. It’s fun to play, simple, and includes achievements to unlock bonus abilities. One of the more complete entries I’ve ever done (possibly because the gameplay was so incredibly simple!).

LD48 #2 theme was Construction/Destruction, with a minor theme of Sheep. As such, I created Hitsuji: Shears Of Fury, a game where you destroy construction equipment as a ninja sheep. It featured a really cool tweening animation system I wish I had used since, as well as some lovely use of very default Allegro fonts. It also included zombie construction workers, and pelicans. Pelicans appear often in these games.