This is an awesome Ninja Game! I have always wanted to create a ninja platformer, and your game inspired me. I like how fluid the animations are and how cool the enemy ai is! It has a lot of strategy in combat, especially against the blue enemies where you can make them turn on each other. The parry is quite difficult to execute, but the attacks looked great! It would be cool if you could add more single-player levels if you have time. Honestly, I think you could make this into a mini hollow-knight if you wanted to! I am also a game dev. but just starting out. I am wondering how you designed the attacks so well. I am not very good at making solid melee combat, so if you get a chance, let me know!
Thank you midnight ninja! I am glad you enjoyed the game and left a comment. Having more singleplayer (and other) content in the future would definitely be really cool, but right now my focus is on my other game Monster Battlegrounds.
I made the attacks quite a while ago, and there are some things I would even do differently, but I am still proud of how smooth the animations feel in the gameplay. In my opinion, the best way to create attacks it to start by creating the key poses. For example, when you are animating a punch, start by drawing the pose where the character is fully extending his arm, when you would hit the opponent. Once that is finished, then draw the frames before and after that. It is usually better to make the startup of the move take longer than the recovery after the main action, so for example: 1 frames getting ready to punch > 1 frame PUNCH > 3 or 4 frames of pulling arm back. It is ok to stretch the bodyparts a bit, even if it looks weird on a still frame, it might make the action look better in motion. Make sure there is a bit of variety in the timing of your different attacks, and take a look at real-life pictures or footage of martial arts, not just from games. There is also an online resource that collected all the animations of the classic arcade fighting game street fighter 3, I think you should not just copy those animations, but it will help you understand how certain body parts move and where professional animators squash and stretch their animations:
https://www.justnopoint.com/zweifuss/
It would be very fun if you released your own game! If you have an early build, it is ok to post it here in the comments to let me know, and if you want to I can give some feedback on the game. Thank you for commenting and thank you for playing!
Hello, Weenter,
Thank you so much for your detailed response and taking your time to help me with this! I don't know many devs who would go out the their way to give me tips on this, so I really appreciate it. I just finished working on a game for a game jam with a friend. While not a sidescroller or a ninja game, it was a good learning experience on how to use github for collaboration and despite some technical hiccups along the way, we were able to make a really cool game. Even though it's unpolished, it's still pretty fun. If you want to check it out, here's the itch.io link: https://team-midnight-rain.itch.io/loopy-lunatics
Since we made it together, we created a new account for it, but my team name is in the credits in the game description. If you play, let me know what you think and things we could improve! We didn't get a chance to put in sound effects yet, and the door for the fifth level doesn't work so we'll have to fix that as well.
Anyway, I really appreciate your advice on the aminations as well as that street fighter animations for reference. Right now, I'm focusing on learning JavaScript with my uncle to do a reboot of his educational geography game that got discontinued, but I plan on starting a ninja platformer soon, possibly after that. I've been thinking about it, and I'd like to maybe try a single-player game almost like yours but maybe more of a metroidvania style with some inspiration from 1986 Legend of Zelda dungeons and upgrade elements. If you'd like, I'll let you know if I make any progress with it.
Also, I checked out a couple of your games and I'd like to give feedback. Overall, the ninja game was awesome and my favorite feature was probably the double-tap to run, which was really interesting for speedrunning and also added a Sonic-type element to the game in that you could go through early stages quickly to get to the new stuff. I also liked the checkpoint system, it made the game less punishing but still just difficult enough with the challenges of the platform and enemies. The only thing that was a bit punishing was the parry system. Maybe I just didn't get the hang of it, but it felt like you had to make the parry exact in order to block opponet attacks. It might be better if you lengthened the timer of the parry so it is a bit easier to execute. However, it was a great game and provided a complete experience.
I also checked out Monster Battlegrounds. This game was also really well done. It felt like an arcade fighting game and was well-polished. I didn't really come across too many issues with this one in particular. It was well-done, the graphics were great, and it was cool that you provided the option to battle the cpu.
Thank you again for you feedback. If you want feedback on anything specific about any of your games, let me know.
Best Regards,
Team Midnight Ninja
Hey Team Midnight Ninja! Nice job on the game you made. It is a unique idea and you did the NES graphics well. I kept dying to walls and it was hard to go through doors, it's probably a skill issue on my side, but in my experience, people want to play a lot of the games that other people made during gamejams, so it's best to make the earlier levels very easy and then keep the rest of the game at a medium difficulty. It wasn't really too hard of a game though, but it might be good to keep in mind that people can sometimes really move on from a game quickly in a gamejam if the early part takes too much time. You could definitely continue working on this game if you wanted to, but of course i hear you have other plans as well, so focus on what you prefer of course. Also, I gotta say, it's nice that you use Godot and I think your programming is already pretty good, even though you call yourself a beginner in another post.
Btw, you don't need to make a shared account to show that 2 people made the game. On your itch.io's game page, just go to:
Edit game (top of your screen) > More (top-right of your screen, in the bar with stuff like Edit game/Metadata) > Admins.
On that screen you can paste the link to each contributor's itch.io page, it will then create a link to accept the admin offer. Just click on that and send it to your friend on discord or something, and that allows 2 people to have the game on their page.
For example, my game Monster Battlegrounds is displayed on my itch.io page, but also on my sound artist Meadow's itch.io page. Just check out these 2 links:
https://weentermakesgames.itch.io/
https://dreamwaremusic.itch.io/
Very nice that you have someone that you can learn programming directly from. I have a friend who is really good at programming in C#, and when we worked together in Godot's gdscript you could really see that those skills transferred well. I am no expert on Javascript, but for as far as I know, it's not really commonly used in game development anymore. So while it is definitely a useful skill and a good way to learn since you have your uncle, make sure to also continue with other languages while making games (depending on what you want to make, something like C# for Unity or Python/gdscript for Godot. C# can be used in both Godot and many other engines, and it is generally useful if you want to get a job later with programming outside of gamedev, GDscript is just simplified Python, so you can learn either. I would say Python is more difficult but will be more useful if you ever intend to get a job with programming, but GDscript is easier and more directly useful in Godot. Whatever you learn, it is a good use of time because it will be easier to learn the other ones.)
And lastly, thanks for the feedback on my games! Silhouette showdown was first made as a multiplayer-only game and a lot of silly programming mistakes were made because i did not keep in mind expanding it to singleplayer too. Now that there are more features, stuff like the parry does not really work well on projectiles and on singleplayer enemies unfortunately. It's prob not a super difficult fix but for about a year, I have been focusing on Monster Battlegrounds and a different game which was a collab with a youtuber. There will eventually be one more update for this game which fixes a bunch of issues and improves the visuals, and i will also uplaod the game to github so that people can check out the code. But that will probably take at least half a year still with all the other priorities unfortunately.
Anyways, good luck with your game man! I am now your second follower so give me a shoutout when you're famous ;). LMK when you make your own game and I will check it out and give some input if you would like that.
Thanks for commenting and playing!
Weenter