Arcade Berg aka. "Learning Game Design with Arcade Berg"

Ninja?

I'm gonna tell you a story about one of my first games.

Back when I was in what's in Sweden called "Gymnasium", being best described as upper secondary school I believe, I made a game.

The game's name is "Ninja?".

The final project at school was open for us students to decide, as long as it had something to do with what we were studying. I was a civic-student myself, so I basically got to do anything that had anything to do with our society. Computer games are part of our culture, right? Yes, it is. And there we go.

I did the design together with a great friend, Jonas and today, 4 years later I can see that it was pretty... Well... Let's just say it wasn't as good as it could have been. The biggest problem was that wasn't very good with programming at all, so even if we had some good ideas they all pretty much failed because I didn't know how to implement them. The time was limited so I had to do something basic.

But the game has Gamepad-support!

I made the game using the software GameMaker (http://www.gamemaker.nl, available 20/12-08). With it you can do pretty much drag 'n drop-editing, but I didn't wanna do that because I wanted to learn so I coded the whole thing within the program. I'm not regretting that decision even if the game probably would have turned out better if I'd just used the tools within the program.

Of course the game is a ninja game. Your avatar can walk, run, jump, double jump, melee attack and throw shurikens. In theory enough to make a pretty decent game but there is pretty close to no tweaking made what so ever. "Does this feel okay? Well, it's working. On to the next task!". Stupid? Perhaps, but I had to finish at least the basics of the game and one level.

I'm actually very proud of the game. Not because it's good, because it isn't. But because it's one of the first games I ever made and I learned so, so much! Even a failure is a success if you learn something, right? "Learning Game Design".

I think people interesting in making games, be it as a hobby or professionally should really keep pushing themselves. If you play it safe, you won't learn as much. At least, that's what I think.

The game demo is available at http://www.grymling.com (20/12-08). The file there is not Windows Vista-compatible I think and the site is closing down during the fall of 2009.

Me and Jonas made a bunch of T-shirts with the Ninja and we managed to sell 17 of them across Sweden, UK and Germany. That was the greatest achievement of them all!