Ninja Tetris

As in Hungary we are also quarantined (there is a declaration from the government to not go outside if not necessary, and places, events closed/cancelled) this month’s meetup was also cancelled and moved to Twitch TV, thanks to Gábor Urbán. There were three games including mine, and you can watch the recording of the live stream on the link above.

Last month’s theme was UNLIKELY VIDEO GAME GENRE MIXES, and I actually had my hand in this theme. I watched a bunch of videos about this theme by Randomize User and I liked the idea, so I suggested it to Dani. I didn’t have Ninja Tetris in mind right away, and I actually wrote down videogame genres and tried to match them together. I choose tetris and stealth first, but I couldn’t come up with anything for stealth mechanic, so I put in beat’em up instead.

As usual I had to do something that I never did before: melee fight. I didn’t overthink this, I just create an invisible box which upon collision do what has to be done. I also made an encounter handler, and this summons enemies, plays cinematics, handle the camera locking and movement between fights, and at the end, summons a boss. Of course I created enemies on the fly, and made cinematic before, just not in an organized way. I gave numbers to the encounters, had cases to handle the encounter type, camera movement and cinematic.

With the Corona virus upon us you’d think I had more time to make the game. And sort of it’s ture, but I also had to work from home (which is going great despite the first couple of days’ technical problems), make food, and do chores. And also the scope was a bit off. I wanted to make a beat’em up (never did before), a tetris (never did before) and a proper arcade like intro (never did before). So, at the end I was out of time, the menu hardly works, only one level, a not-too-good intro, unpolished encounters (too much enemies), and the boss isn’t too exciting to fight.

But all in all it was fun to make this one. I actually pulled off the tetris part by myself, though there was a moment when I thought about searching for a proper tetris code, but I didn’t. I faced a lots of problems with the tetris pieces. Should they go outside the gui boundaries there was a chance to crash the game, so I made them stay inside (when they are pushed, when they just wander, or when they are turned). I loved to make the GO! sign as they were usual in beat’em ups, and the small cinematics. The ninja, jumping out of the boat is basically not the player object, but after jumping on the concrete that object creates the actual player. This is the case at the end too, player object is destroyed, and a cinematic object walks to the sewers and jumps down in the manhole. This, as Csiri was pointing out during the stream, of course was inspired by a C=64 game called Last Ninja. I also made a destroyable object and here and there they have some powerups. A big piece of meat heals the character to the max. A ninja bust for extra life. And a shuriken to stun all enemies and break all trashcans on the screen.

In a couple of days I finetuned the game a little bit. I fixed/finished the menu, added a cabinet texture to the sides, and some screen effects, and a little dimension to the tetris enemies. I also realized I still have questionable parts with the code and possible falulty parts at least with the tetris mechanic. But unfortunately I should start on the new theme (Negative space), and this idea, at least with tetris part included will be abandoned.

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