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[heitorburger]

Hi everyone,

This is a project I'm working for a high score competition. It's a pretty simple game, where you have to change the color of your player by pressing the spacebar, so you can collide with the other colored blocks and score points.

Team:
Programming:
Heitor Tashiro Sergent
Art:
João Vitor Munduruca
Rafael Fernandes

Game Link:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1053748/RGBNinja12.swf (Updated graphics)
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1053748/RGBNinja9.swf (Sideways/No colors test version)
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1053748/RGBNinja7.swf

Screenshot:




This is a project I'm hoping to port to mobile after I'm finished. My plan now is to change the feedback for losing lives, add 3 power-ups, add more sound effects and add art to it.  

I would appreciate any feedback on gameplay, specially about difficulty. I'm not sure if the game is too hard/short on the first playthrough.

[RichMakeGame!]

its nicely presented, but kinda boring right now. there's no choices to make or risks to take.. you either get in the right lane as the right colour or you don't

[Glauco]

I also believe it is nicely presented: the art is minimalist, but looks "right" with the light use of glow and blur effects.

The core of the game needs some twists though, to keep the game more interesting. Are there any new elements beside the flashing blocks? What about a block you have to evade (a black and white ninja with a face, maybe)? It would be interesting to have shortcuts too (arrow keys? numbers?)!

I'm experiencing some bugs with the flashing blocks. Whenever I collide with them, their sprite stands still without vanishing (and sometimes I even lose a life). I suspect it has something to do about the color of the ninja right before the block "chooses" its color.

I'm looking forward into playing a finished version of this game Keep up!

[leonelc29]

What about a block you have to evade (a black and white ninja with a face, maybe)? It would be interesting to have shortcuts too (arrow keys? numbers?)!

this. the current game is hard because i have to memorize the color sequence, and act quickly to score a point or lose a life. make 3 button for color change instead of space. the background are kinda blank now, but it will look good if you aiming for neon-style glowing graphic.

[RichMakeGame!]

yeah, this point occurred to me too. It's not so bad as a computer artist because r, g, b is kind of ingrained in my brain (even then I had to pause sometimes) but for a casual punter the order means nothin,, apart from it's the name of the game

[heitorburger]

Hey guys, thanks for the feedback!

@RichMakeGame! I completely agree with you that there are no choices or risks to take... Reading this article from Team Meat (http://www.supermeatboy.com/16/Extra_credit_/#b), I couldn't figure out what changes I could make to it.

There are some other blocks types I could put there. Like @Glauco suggested, a black block which you would have to dodge, there's also a block that changes lanes here: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1053748/RGBNinjaMovingBlocks.swf. Some other ideas I had were blocks clusters (this got me thinking about Guitar Hero):



A black block coupled with a white block(you can hit it with any color), that you would have to dodge just close to it:



Blocks you could only hit sideways:



I forgot to mention on the first post, my plan is to launch this on mobile devices, that's why there's only one button to change the colors.

Honestly, I'm currently lost on where to go with this game. A friend of mine, rafaelfe, who's also doing the art for me  , also pointed out early about the difficulty of memorizing the color sequence, that maybe I could have a visual hint on what's the next color. Now I don't know if it's best to change it to 2 colors, or maybe even take this whole color thing off. Also, adding a bunch of other blocks types may not make the game more fun, just more complicated.

[leonelc29]

auto-change the player's color and won't lose life when a block slip through?(like: i'm blue now, and i can only hit oncoming blue block. after some period of time, i automatically change color into either one of the other 2 color. get it?)

or

random change the color after the player hit the true color?(like: now i'm red color, when i hit the oncoming red color, i randomly change into either red, green or blue. get it?)

[Qqwy]

even while on phones, I think you should be able to use the 1, 2, 3 buttons or something like that . About the next/previous color, you could show small boxes floating on the side of the ninja(rotating when switching colors), to make the color pattern easier to grasp.
Also, the game might become more fun with music(the best would of course be music in sync with the blocks) and epic combo-multipliers, a special effect/sound after hitting ten blocks in a row, etc.

Also, powerups like a block that changes the next 10 blocks to white, a block that speeds things up, a block that slows things down, a block that lets you able to shoot blocks of your color before they are near you, a block that grows the ninja so he now always is in two columns, etc.
another idea is to at some point add more columns, flip or tilt the screen(while keeping the controls the same), etc. to make the game harder.


I think this can become quite a nice game, but right now its still very plain .

[heitorburger]

Thanks for the feedback Leonelc and Qqwy, I'm making a list with all the suggestions you guys gave me so far  .

Just thought I would post a small update, testing how the game would be sideways. Turns out making it top-down makes it really difficult to do anything really good with art (can't really make an animation, or you can only see the back of the player, while seeing the front of the enemies).

I made these sprites myself, so bear with some programmer's art  .

Also, I'm testing not changing colors anymore, and putting blocks closer to each other.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1053748/RGBNinja9.swf

[leonelc29]

it's quite fun and chaotic without changing color, though currently the game make me think of Nyan Cat FLY!

the art is acceptable, not really THAT programmy art-y.

since it's for mobile, maybe you can make it change lane by tapping that lane? anyway, nice to see it grow 

[heitorburger]

@Leonelc I had never heard of Nyan Cat FLY! , but I really enjoyed it... and it seems very similar to that last prototype of mine, but with a lot more polish.

And that's exactly what I'm thinking for the control scheme on mobile. If the player touches on the left side of the screen, tapping a lane will change the ninja to it. On the right side of the screen, it'll change the ninja color.

Just a tiny update on gameplay, but a nice one in art this time . Two friends, Rafael Fernandes (@rafaelfe) and João Vitor Munduruca(@jvmunduruca) gave me a hand with the Ninja, and the background, respectively. They're already doing better versions of both, but I thought it already gave the game a better look  .

Here's the new build link and a screenshot:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1053748/RGBNinja12.swf

[larsiusprime]

Just a quick FYI: red-green colorblindness is a pretty common disability, especially in men, where it's as high as 10% of the population. I'd recommend using red-blue-yellow instead of red-blue-green to differentiate the colors, and even then you might want to use brightness to distinguish them as well.

Take a screenshot of your game, put it in photoshop and do "greyscale," see if you can still tell the differences between the three colors. If you can't, neither would a colorblind person be likely to, either.

[RichMakeGame!]

good advice from larsiusprime- and do bear in mind that mode>greyscale is what you want, which is NOT the same as desaturate. greyscale will give a closer representation of what the eye sees

about the art style, I would maybe think about nudging it a little bit back to the glowy simpleness of the original, which looked really cool. The more representational you go vs abstract, the harder it is to look good. I'd like to see the same setting but using the original version aesthetic (no texture on the ground for example, a bit more simple and glowy overall)

as for the gameplay, It seems a little bit of a shame to lose the colour changing. What if the colour of your ninja changed at timed intervals and you had to match the colours? (some little indicator could count down to the next change).

OR, maybe have pickups which let you change colour. If you miss the pickup you lose the points for the incoming coloured ninjas, and maybe it's also hard to dodge them. This could add the 'risk' factor as you scramble across to grab the right coloured pickup. I dunno

then you could keep the control simplicity, and not worry about people memorizing the colour order, and keep the RGB concept.

I do like the ninja stars you added. Might be nice to make them white and glowy too

[heitorburger]

I don't know if this is the right section to post this, but here goes...

Well, I managed to finish the game for the Windows Phone 7(http://www.windowsphone.com/en-US/apps/5606a89c-eee7-4e69-a15b-d5c498d79c0c), and release it on the Marketplace. I’d like to talk a little bit about what went right and what went wrong (like Gamasutra’s postmortem). I'm still not happy with the end result, and we plan on changing some things before releasing it for iOS and Android, but with what've learned, I believe that maybe, this could be helpful to someone .

Before I begin, I’ll post two images, one with a graph showing the number of downloads over time, and the other showing the number of downloads per country.




What went right:


Actionscript 3 /Flashpunk

The game started as a small Flash prototype. The initial idea was to mix Canabalt with Portal, and from there, it changed and evolved to what it is today. Making those prototypes in AS3, and utilizing Flashpunk, allowed me to test ideas quickly, and have feedback from my friends easily, by sharing a website link so they could play it. Below are a list of the prototypes I created:

http://megaswf.com/serve/1113136/ (3 lanes, Shooting and Near Miss mechanics, from racing games like Need for Speed and Burnout)
http://megaswf.com/serve/1114413/ (Near Miss, mouse control)
http://megaswf.com/serve/1152954/ (Colors mechanics introduced)
http://megaswf.com/serve/1153836/ (Colors mechanics changed, similar to final version)
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1053748/RGBNinja12.swf (Close to the final version of the game)

C# / XNA

Making the game released version using XNA, was the best choice for producing it in the shortest amount of time. Since I already had participated in Microsoft’s competition, Dream.Build.Play, I already had some familiarity with the framework, as with the C# language. Besides being a really good and simple framework, Microsoft has a bunch of free game templates that you can get for free at their website (http://create.msdn.com/en-US/education/catalog/). Basically any simple thing you may want to do, there’s an example there, well commented, that you can use as a starting point.

Small Team

Having been a part of a few projects, I noticed that the bigger the team, the harder it is to finish something, and make it cohesive. From what I can tell, to have a big team, people need experience and leadership. So, having only 3 people on the team (me as a programmer, Rafael Fernandes and João Vitor Munduruca as artists) made the tasks easy to organize, and quickly delivered. To help us organize, we used Trello (https://trello.com/), a great online, and free, tool. It is really simple to use, allows you to create boards and tasks, distribute it to members, set deadlines, checklists, comments, upload pictures, and many others. It’s really good to see how a project is coming along and what each member is doing.

Portability:

Fortunately, I found a tool called MonoTouch (http://xamarin.com/monotouch). It allows developers to use C# to develop applications for the iOS and Android. It’s not cheap (starting price at $400 USD), but they have a student discount, so I could get it for $80 USD. Using it still doesn’t allow you to use XNA. Fortunately again, there’s a open-source project called MonoGame (http://monogame.codeplex.com/), that can be utilized with MonoTouch, to use XNA. I have already made some tests on the iPhone 3GS, and iPad 1, and I could port a version of the game in 1 day, running smoothly on both devices.

What went wrong:


Windows Phone 7

Windows Phone 7 is a new platform, being released about one year ago, and only recently released it in Brazil. That means that the number of devices is much lower than the other platforms (iOS and Android), which means that less people will have access to the game. Besides that, we didn’t do any marketing for the game, besides posting it on our Twitter and Facebook accounts. However, as most of our friends are brazilian, and almost no one has an Windows Phone here... Well, not many people got to know about it, and those who did couldn’t play.

Launching / Exposure

RGB Ninja was the first game I ever published. I had heard that Microsoft submission process was really thorough, and I would probably have to do some programming to handle a few cases (for example, the user is listening to music on the device, launches the game that has a soundtrack. The game should ask the user if it wants to keep listening to its song, or switch to the game’s audio). That’s why I decided to upload the game, in a playable state, but with a couple of bugs. While it went through the submission process, I would work on it, and after it didn’t get approved, I would be able to see all the specific cases I had to deal with. Turned out that the game did get approved, and I had chose to automatically publish it after the submission process (my fault :D). Luckily, I found an option to hide your application from the marketplace. The problem is that hiding it doesn’t change the fact that your application already got published, and it should appear on top of the “New” list in the Marketplace. For a game with no marketing, that’s probably the period where it gets the highest exposure. The result was that, after two weeks I updated the game, and “unhid” it. By that time, the game was already really far down the “New” list, and it got no exposure at all.

[harkme]

Hmmm interesting. It's always good to learn from one's mistakes.