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[doczal]

Ninjet - an endless shoot-em-up where you can transform between a Jet and a Ninja Robot!

 

Hi guys! We are Pixel Mystic, a team of four. We are mostly new to game development, so our main goal with this project is to complete and release our very first game!

Ninjet has been in development for several months now, and we hope to release the game within the next 1-2 months.

Target Platforms

• iOS
• Android

Planned Features

  
Jet mode:
Auto-fires ranged projectiles. Takes damage from collision with enemies and projectiles.

  
Ninja Robot mode:
Close-ranged beam sabre attacks. Takes damage from projectiles, but immune to enemy collision. Has a separate health bar that reduces over time, but regenerates when in Jet mode.

• Endless shmup gameplay featuring enemies that get progressively more powerful
• Ability to switch between jet and ninja robot modes on the fly
• Over 6 different enemy types that spawn in a variety of patterns
• 3-4 bosses that appear every time you surpass a certain score threshold
• Over 5 power-ups including shield and homing missiles
• Local high score leaderboards

Gameplay GIFs

Basic Jet gameplay



Switching to ninja robot mode and slashing enemies



Here comes a boss!




Thanks for reading! Will post more development updates and screenshots later on.  

EDIT:

Ninjet has been released on the Google Play Store! Check it out here: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.pixelmystique.ninjet&hl=en

[doczal]

Hey guys, been doing some bug-fixing the past few days, but more recently found some time to update the visuals for a couple of our power-ups!

The first power-up we've worked on is the good ol' Homing Missile!

This is what it used to look like:


And here's how it looks now:


The next power-up, the Jammer, is a bit more interesting. It basically disables all enemies on screen from firing their bullets. Enemies that appear later on are also affected if the Jammer is still active (indicated by the pulsating rings around the player).

Old jammer effect:


New effects:



That's all for now! Gotta get back to working on the game!

[doczal]

Our artist just got done designing some new enemies! Once we've decided on which ones to use, they will be animated next. Check 'em out!:



We've taken a pretty cool approach to designing the look of the bosses in our game. Basically we take an existing enemy in the game, then super-size it! The boss will also somewhat inherit some of the properties of its smaller counterpart.

For example, the first boss is based off our "Charger" enemy, which basically "charges" vertically across the screen while firing at the player. The boss will also have a similar "charge" attack (on top of a couple other attacks), though it'll be much harder to dodge the charge due to the boss being at least 5 times bigger!

You've probably seen what it looks like in my previous posts, but here's a simplified look at how it came to be:



Our 2nd boss is based off the "Gunship" enemy, which is a blue worm-like thing that fires a laser beam at the player. Similarly, the 2nd boss will also fire laser beams at the player, though the laser beams are a bit bigger... To say the least.



The programming for both these bosses is close to done, but I will go over their attacks in more detail in a future post.

Thanks for reading!

[doczal]

Haven't had the time to post any updates lately, but we're still working hard on the game!

Been mostly fine-tuning the difficulty of our enemy waves, but we'll have to spend a lot more time play-testing before we get it just right...

In the meantime, we just made a couple of new enemy types! Check 'em out:

These guys keep shooting at you till you destroy them, but they also release bullets when they explode!



These guys are beefy and will shoot bullets that track and move towards the player's position for a while.



That's all for now

[doczal]

Hi guys,

I just finished working on the basic difficulty progression for our game, though we are still fine-tuning it via play-testing.

Like most other endless games, Ninjet gets harder the longer the player lasts. So today I will talk a little bit about how the difficulty progression in our game works.

The way Ninjet works in general is pretty simple. The player will fight through a bunch of random enemy waves, and after scoring enough points, a boss will appear. After defeating the boss, one of the difficulty modifiers in the game will be increased (and announced to the player), and the player will repeat this cycle until they die.

1. Fight random enemy waves


2. Fight boss


3. Difficulty goes up --> Repeat 1


As of right now, we have 4 difficulty modifiers:

1. Enemy Wave Up - New enemy types or harder enemy wave variations are introduced into the mix.
  ---> 

2. Enemy Bullet Up - Increases the number of bullets enemies will shoot.
  ---> 

3. Enemy Health Up - Increases enemy health by 1.

4. Enemy Damage Up - Increases the damage enemy projectiles do by 1.


Right now, the way it works is that the first few boss kills will just introduce tougher enemies and enemy waves. Once all possible enemy types and enemy wave variations are unlocked, the game will cycle through increasing enemy bullet --> enemy health --> enemy damage. However, as of right now the bosses don't really scale with difficulty apart from damage and health. We are looking into possibly adding extra attack patterns as the game difficulty goes up.

Let us know what you guys think about this system!

[doczal]

It's been a while since our last update... Progress has slowed down a bit the past few weeks due to some of our real life commitments. But we are still continuing to work on the game none the less! We've recently finished programming the 2nd and 3rd bosses.

Here's what the 3rd boss looks like:




And here are a few short GIFs to give you guys a glimpse of how they work:

The 2nd boss makes use of huge laser beams to threaten the player:



The 3rd boss is pretty annoying as it constantly throws out turrets and time bombs that the player must quickly deal with:




As of right now, we're currently finalizing our 4th and "final" boss. It will be a "secret" boss that will only appear before worthy players. We can't wait to show him to you guys! Stay tuned!

[doczal]

The final boss is done! He's called the Shinobot and he can transform, just like the player! He throws "shurikens" and makes use of shadow clones to confuse the player. Unlike the other standard bosses that can appear at any point in the game, the Shinobot will only appear if the player is able to satisfy certain conditions. What are those conditions? ... We're still deciding on them

Here are some GIFs:

Sprite animation


Jet form and shadow clones!


When his health drops low enough, the Shinobot activates his ultimate attack!



We're also finally showing off some actual video footage of our game in action. This is the Shinobot boss fight:





Let us know what you think of the boss fight music. It was composed by our talented sound guy, and he calls this specific track "Dance of the Laser Beams", which I thought was a pretty cool name lol. This track was made specifically for the secret boss, and we have a different track for the standard bosses as well.

That's all for now. Any feedback is always appreciated!

[doczal]

Time for another progress update!

At the moment, we've finalized most of our gameplay content and are just fine-tuning the difficulty/balance of the game. We've also begun working on implementing our menus.

Here's a screenshot of our main menu:




One of the things that we've also been working on is making our bosses more difficult as the player progresses. We're happy to say that all 3 of our main bosses will now have up to 4 difficulty levels each! So be prepared for a new level of challenge each time you face them

To give you a better idea of how this works, here are screenshots of our first boss at different levels of difficulty:

Level 1


Level 2


Level 3


Hopefully you get the idea

Since we're making a mobile game, we're also planning to add some unlockables. We're working on getting in some cosmetic skins that the player can unlock using our in-game currency or possibly with real $$ as well. However, the skins themselves will have no effect on gameplay and serve only to make your jet look cooler 

That's all for now!

[doczal]

It's been a while since our last update.

We're happy to announce that Ninjet has finally been released on the Google Play Store!

Download here: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.pixelmystique.ninjet&hl=en

Unfortunately the iOS version is still on hold for the time being.

[chriswearly]

I'll be the first to admit that this dev somehow escaped my peripherals. But this looks really good. Nice job with the art!

[doczal]

I'll be the first to admit that this dev somehow escaped my peripherals. But this looks really good. Nice job with the art!

Thanks a lot, man! Glad you like the art! I know we haven't gotten any responses here since I started the thread, so I'm glad we at least caught the attention of 1 person. It means a lot to us.

[lobstersteve]

This looks really good
I like the colors, the enemy designs and how it seems that you took good care of patterns (enemy waves and enemy bullet patterns)
I actually was making a shmup myself lately and i think we share some design choices
Will this game be for PC also? Because i really don't like playing on my phone. Or is it a lot of work to make it playable with mouse instead of touch?

[doczal]

This looks really good
I like the colors, the enemy designs and how it seems that you took good care of patterns (enemy waves and enemy bullet patterns)
I actually was making a shmup myself lately and i think we share some design choices
Will this game be for PC also? Because i really don't like playing on my phone. Or is it a lot of work to make it playable with mouse instead of touch?

Thanks!

We used Stencyl to make this game, so I'm pretty sure we can output a Windows build fairly easily. In fact, most of our initial testing was done using Flash builds and keyboard/mouse for controls.

However, I can't guarantee that we will ever publish a desktop version of the game. That being said, we do understand that quite a number of people don't enjoy playing on touch screens, especially with games like these. So in the future we will definitely consider releasing a Windows/Mac or at least a Flash build so that more people will be able to experience our game!