Ninjas tell the tales of the games they create

We are best! We raise our guitars to the sky and destroy our competitors with a lightning-fast awesome shredding tune. At least that was what the jury thought at this year’s Norwegian Game Awards. We won the prize for Best Innovation. We are very happy for this honor, and have goofy smiles all over our faces. This is what the jury had to say:

Whilst many of the entries in this years competition seemed to focus on careful execution rather than new ideas Apocalypse stood out as something entertaining even though it was far from being finished. What the demo currently lacks in variation and visual finish is less important than what it promises to become once new levels, abilities and strategies are put in place. The jury feels that the team have created a story where you play as evil & immoral not because it’s supposed to be edgy or “different”, but simply because it’s great fun!

We would like to congratulate the other teams who won. Game of The Year went to Owlboy, the only way this would have been more awesome, was if it was named Ninjaboy, but I digress. The prize for Best Execution went to our old archnemesis Illuminatics for their game Evil Jr. We’re not sure it includes any ninjas, but great work none the less. Garbalicious ran off with the prize for Best Concept, and The Forklift Game was awarded the Comittee’s Choice. Awesomez!

Quite handsome, you might say (and that guy in the back is pretty fat too) Awesome photo by Robert Nordan.

So… I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking of yogurt.

What does that even mean, and more importantly, what in the name of Skeletor™ have we been up to since the last post?

Oh do say, old ham, we’ve been up to a lot. Personally, I defected to North Korea, but decided that the communist lifestyle didn’t go well with my evil imperialist ways. So now I’m back to spreading the great word of The Satan™ to children aged between five and six.

But enough of this horrible nonsense. I will now give you a nice list of highlights in our development of Apocalypse these past weeks. It will be both terrible and great and you will feel tingly all over. In no particular order.

I can see my church from here!

• Death character modeled and put in-game with animations and the whole shebang
• Death’s scythe is equippable. Currently can kill peasants and create lots of blood.
• Added proper classes for peasant homes, fields, wells and churches
• Peasants currently have the following AI behaviors:
  • Will fetch food at a farm or water at well and bring it to his home if he feels he needs this
  • Will eat or drink at home to prevent dying of death
  • Will flee to the nearest church and alert the authorities if he sees a horseperson (Death)
  • Will also take a  stroll if he feels this is awesome
  • Will pathfind properly for the most part, except in cases of extreme stupidity
• Player movement is now relative to the camera
• Ragdolls! Yay!
• Church holy aura
• New tree, church, rock, well, field and fence models
• Visual details, like moving cloud shadows on the ground, height fog, etc

Killed by Death

We have one big admission, and that is that we are falling more and more in love with the UDK the more we get to know it. In fact, this other day UDK gave me such a raging boner that I leveled a whole city block. I’m still in recovery. I’ll mention some of the things which has helped us achieve greatness: The navmesh system for pathfinding, animation notifications, ease of adding trail particles, the remote control, archetypes, unrealscript in general and much more.

We are afraid that there’ll be a lull in the development in the coming month, as we have to complete our Master Thesis (in the black art of the Ninja). Curses! But fear not, we will get back to working hard once the summer commences. Remember, ninjas don’t need sunlight, they only need computers. (I might be thinking of nerds, but who knows.)

Still, we are eagerly awaiting the next gift from the UDK gods, namely the inclusion of the UI middleware Scaleform Gfx. It will be awesome, as it (hopefully) simplifies the UI development process a lot. It comes at a great time too, as we have yet to implement any heavy UI stuff, and we are a bit fearful of the UDK’s UIscene system. Some of the 3D-stuff you can do with it looks awe-inspiring, as you can have 3D user interfaces directly in the game world.

We shall therefore sacrifice over nine thousand platypuses and retarded babies each day to speed up this integration.

Welcome to the development blog of the game studio with the most awesome name in the history of Man:  Wailing Ninja Studios! Our current project is Apocalypse: The Four Unmounted Horsepersons.

And how far are we along on this, you say? Well, I’d be lying if I said that we are ahead of the schedule. But we can safely say that the guitars are bought, the boners are raging and the work has begun. We are using Epic Games’ Unreal Development Kit for our development and it is awesome. Sadly, our skills with it are puny and weak. But while we have a lot to learn yet, progress is being made.

We have set ourselves a goal of delivering something for the game competition Norwegian Game Awards, and this goal is something we will work hard trying to reach.

In the meantime, here’s a concept of Death:

Keep on wailing!