Kickstarter

Here we are a year into our project and we're finally in the last stretch.  Delays, funding problems, and a redesign all successfully hurdled, we are pulling together the final levels and working on completing the last bits of environmental artwork right now. Still to come we will need to finish up all of our other enemies, but we have one more down this week: a Sewer Pirate. 

The first "main quest" scene was fully "art-ed" today, that is a technical term we use in the biz for when an artist makes an art thing and it is good. The "art-ed" scene is the one where McNinja encounters his young patient who is transforming into a giant lumberjack. It's a bit different from how it went down in the comic, so you'll just have to wait and see what artistic license King Radical took with story ;)

Speaking of King Radical, check out the craziness that is going on with our employer in the current story arc at DrMcNinja.com: parallel universes, giant-robots, and radical wizards, what more could you want?

Anyway, back to the game at hand. The sewer level is complete, including colliders and triggers and everything required to make it playable; it is just waiting on the enemies required to make it fun, before we can release a beta version. I started on a couple more of the levels yesterday and judging by how quickly they are pulling together we may have the beta ready by the end of the month. In case you are wondering, these "Levels" are quite extensive, they are more on par with a zone from super metroid than a level from Mario Bros. There are only 10 such levels planned for the game and that should be plenty for all of your exploration needs.

-Chance Wees 

Hey yall,

Chance Wees here, the games lead programmer and gameplay designer, I will be taking over for Hunter doing these weekly updates since his day job (the thing that keeps the studio funded that we are very greatful for) is keeping him a bit too busy at the moment.

This update marks the first time that we are officially level design complete! The last couple weeks I sat down with a large pad of graph paper, and a million Ideas, and sketched out the levels for all of the different game zones. Now I am actually mapping the levels in our game editor and they are coming together swimmingly.

Alisa has already completed the tilesets for two more levels zones (The Sewer and the Laboratory), so our next gameplay demo will include a small sample of those areas.

We were able to hire two additional people, both part time, to help out with level mapping (putting my designs into the editor and making them pretty) and with animation. The animations are the longest time expenditure at this point since when we decided that it looked better being proper sprite assets, rather than paper-dolls, it added several additional steps to our asset workflow.

My favorite thing that has been added recently is the completion of the art assets for the two types of tresure chests and my implementation of the random loot system. You can look forward to finding hidden treasure strewn throughout the game in normal chests and in golden chests. Normal chests can be opened immediately when you find them and can only be opened once, they normally contain an amount of in game currency or some inventory items. Gold chests require you to use a Golden Key, which can be found in game or purchased with in-game currency, and can be opened once per day per golden chest that you discover. Gold chests contain various powers for the characters as well as much better rewards of in game currency, they also have a chance of unlocking new decorative items for McNinja's lair in the shop. 

Decorations are not required by any means, but it gives completionists something to look forward to and each purchased decoration releases a small burst of coins every day that can be picked up when you first run the game. Think of them like the login rewards that some other mobile games give you, but far more radical ;D

We are trucking ever onward towards this games release and hope that you will enjoy the products of our labor! We've had some set-backs and re-designs, but we are finally in the home stretch.

Cheers!

Ok, it has been a while since we've had a Monday update, and I apologize for that. We've continued to post things to twitter and tumblr as teasers, but it is time for a proper update. The team has still been variously recovering from the cold/flu/evil affliction that we caught while down in San Francisco, so we've been saving all our energy for working directly on the game. We've lost a few days directly to sickness, but overall we haven't lost much time.

Game Status:

We are continuing on the art asset creation and we're bringing another artist on board to help Alisa out. We'll post some previews of his work when we've got something fun to show you. Level creation is moving forward, with detailed designs of the levels being finalized while the art assets for them are being created. We are on track for our intended June release.

Next Release Status:

Our next feature preview will have a different section of level for you to play with, as well as bugfixes for what we've encountered so far. This will probably be out in early May, I'll keep you posted when we have a more concrete date. From here forward, there likely won't be any new features to preview. We have a few more to put in, but we want some of them to be a surprise for the release. All of the major systems for McNinja as a playable character are already in, and we are saving the way the other characters you can play with to be surprises, for now.

That's it for this week! We'll be back next week with a new update, and weekly updates again from here out.