Shinobi Mountain Log

I'm going to log the dev timeline for this little game more for myself than anyone else.

Shinobi Mountain lived in my head for a couple weeks leading up to a game jam for Action Button discord server, so naturally I made sure to showhorn it into the jam theme, which ended up being "The dumbest thing you've ever heard of." Ok, a mountain climber battling ninjas to save his girlfriend was already a pretty dumb idea so I figure I can get away with that. I made sure to not begin scripting anything until the jam started, but I did reuse some basic, boiler plate code, i.e. basic Love2D functions (load, update, draw, etc), and a basic game state structure.

By the end of the weekend jam I had the first iteration I uploaded. With lots of help from AB discord users @kafkand and @Clairesville, we had a functioning game with a title screen, a mountain face to scale, a parallaxing forest/sky background, a climber who moves with a logarithmic function to simulate the lurching movement of a climber reaching for his next hand hold, a sword swing attack, and ninja enemies with a basic decision-making AI to move toward the player and attack when within range. When the player reaches the top the game is over. I was in the middle of coding hitboxes for the player and enemies in order to resolve combat collisions when I ran out of time and had to wrap it up.

I'm definitely happy with what we accomplished in a weekend. Clipping assets from FF Tactics is the sort of tedium I can handle without a deadline, I did the player char (Mustadio) and @Clairesville did the ninja sprite. @kafkand drew all the background and title screen original art. It would have looked so much worse if I had attempted to do it. 

To do (phase1): -finish combat system

-Add SFX and Music

-Add an opening animation to set the scene, and a girlfriend character at the top of the mountain, perhaps guarded by one final enemy.

-Add mouse and touch controls, ultimately this game is designed for mobile.

(Phase 2):-Draw new sprites using the FFT stand-ins as reference/skeleton. 

-Add a rope that attaches to the player who must then anchor at various edge locations in the cliff face. The rope will limit the distance a player can move from the previous anchor point, thus creating a route the player must follow up the mountain.

-Add different enemy types (rappelling ninjas, fast/slow, ones that throw shurikens?)

-Add more stages leading to a Japanese style castle at the top of the mountain where your GF is being held. Each stage will use a pixel shader to change the time of day. The player reaches the castle by nightfall and the route is lit by lanterns with lighting shader effects.

That's the vision.