Adam Searle » Blog

(2 blog posts in one night, rockin!)

I (we) have a branding problem, with ninjaman. We don’t know what to call it. See back in 2004, we made ‘Ninjaman’ for the second half of the year. The game was STOLEN by some website who I care not to mention here, it was a bit flattering, but on the whole annoying because they are one of the key ‘bad’ flash sites that steals games and never responds to emails requesting them to be pulled down. So that was ‘Ninjaman’

In 2005, we spent the whole year redoing ninjaman and making it totally pimp. It was a massive massive effort. The 2004 effort was a lot for its time, but the 2005 effort was many times greater (also as I could focus most of the year on it, I didn’t need to do well in any other subject, and I had relatively easy subjects, and Andy Polaine is awesome for giving me 6 units of credit for the annual cd!). So do we call this ninjaman, Ninjaman2? Or just ‘Ninjaman’? Considering we see this as the version we wish to market - as we didn’t market 2004’s effort - maybe starting off on a clean slate as Ninjaman is the way to go. Irrelevant for online distribution, but our physically printed CD cases (they look awesome - proper game cases etc) refer to it as ‘Ninjaman’.

Next year, we may further expand on Ninjaman, adding in what we didn’t have time for this year: more levels, more enemies, an end boss, and maybe a story. Jason would like to hence call this Ninjaman Preview, and next years one Ninjaman Complete. Does attaching ‘preview’ to this release downplay it a bit? (or demo, or teaser, or similar words). What about 2004/2005/2006?

Right now I’m leaning towards calling this Ninjaman, the previous one…. Ninjaman Preview or something, and whatever else we have on the horizon, we’ll work that out then.