Ninjaman

Ninjaman is a Flash-based game produced as a collaboration between myself, Jason Chow and Johnny Le during our time at University in 2005. You play as the character Ninjaman, a little ninja guy who runs around overcoming his opposition with a variety of moves and special combos. Early on in its rise online, we sold a spin-off game by the name of Samurai Sam to Miniclip. To date, Ninjaman and Samurai Sam have totalled over 30 million plays globally, thus making Ninjaman the flag in the ground in my game development career.

My specific involvement with the project was as developer and project manager. Alongside the game I developed the Ninjaman level editor - a Flash and XML based app which Johnny used to build our levels. The game utilised various advanced rendering techniques for its time, in order to deliver a high resolution and rapid frame-rate experience.

 
Ninjaman trailer

 
The Ninjaman story…

Back in our second year of University in 2004, the three of us, taught by our much respected Andy Polaine wished to make a game. At the time we had the lofty desire to craft an RPG; you know, swords, monsters, player upgrades, items, a solid story, and an epic world. Uh, ok, so we scrapped that after realising it just wasn’t possible to make in 14 weeks! What resulted was an idea shift to a game about a ninja. We all love ninjas, and we all love games. Out of the ashes of our RPG idea, arose Ninjaman!

At the end of semester for Multimedia Authoring 2, what we had was Ninjaman 1 - built on the assessment requirement specifications of being a mobile phone capable resolution and file size. We still keep a copy online as a standalone download: Mac and Windows. But we felt this was only the start.

For our final year major work, the three of us decided to continue the path of Ninjaman and make an all new version. This new one would have a wildly more sophisticated battle system with heaps of moves and combos. A much larger screen size would be used, running smoother and providing way more detail. A wide variety of enemies and maps would provide a deeper experience. Thus, we set out again to make a game, this time having just over 15 months rather than 14 weeks.

With the game complete at the end of the year (minus a few enemies and maps due to time limitations), we put the game on show at our colleges end of year exhibition. We had Playstation control pads hooked up to several computers for players to have a more games console experience, and played the promotional trailer in the screening auditorium to an overwhelming response. All in all, the exhibition night was great. But it was only the beginning!

After taking a few weeks off to decompress after an insane year, in early 2006 we reassembled and polished off the game in preparation for its online launch. On January 8 it went online. On January 13 we had 32,000 hits and had been selected as the Newgrounds daily feature. On January 22 we hit a million. Very exciting times!

Shortly after, we sold a license of the game to gaming portal super-site Miniclip.com, rebading the game as ‘Samurai Sam’ - same ninja character, same levels etc, just a new name and title screen to differentiate it. Samurai Sam has gone on to be a successful game in the Miniclip world too. Our only other profiteering out of the Ninjaman story is the use of advertising on our site - Google Adsense proved to be a good way to harness the sheer traffic to the website!

In terms of media response, we had a few successes there too. The American TV network G4TV aired our game during one of their shows - their producer was kind enough to send us a DVD of the screening. We were interviewed in an issue of the CoFA Magazine. Since then I’ve made a second appearance in 2007 as a “where are they now” alumni.

Ninjaman was a great starting point for the three of us, and we continue to grow from there. For Jason and myself, our successes lead us into the creation of Subversive Games, in which we transitioned into making games on a professional basis. Johnny likewise became involved in a start-up, working with the terribly talented guys over at Fluidx. We continue to throw around the idea that one day, we may unite again and collaborate once more!

On a technical note, a funny story about our sharp rise in website traffic. Just before the game really took off in mid January, we were oo-ing and ahh-ing over what we thought was an amazingly capacious hosting plan with Dreamhost - 1 terabyte per month to host the game with. We figured we’d never even use a quarter of that… and then the game took off! We consumed our entire months hosting in just over two days, and were being sent emails from Dreamhost warning of huge excess usage fees for all the traffic our game was generating! Luckily our University stepped into the rescue and agreed to host it for us - at one point we consumed half their entire bandwidth. Don’t tell their IT department :)