World of Ninjas

Description

World of Ninjas is a minimalist 2D top-down stealth game, somewhere between “Commandos” and “Hotline Miami” but with a ninja theme, where you can create your own levels.

History

I made this game during holidays, when I needed a break from my "big" project "A Thief's Melody". I wanted to do something short, like 1 week dev. Actually, it ended up being 2 weeks with the little polish and fix here and there, but it was OK.

I challenged myself to code a A* star path planning in destructible environments that ran in real time (I had to implement time slicing because my PC wasn't good enough).

Game Rules

• Goal: On each level, get the sword(s) and escape far away from the buildings (in any direction you want). Just get far enough (in reality you have to leave the level area).
• Controls: arrows or [zqsd] + space + mouse. By default it’s AZERTY-friendly, but you can change the config in 5s on the splash screen. You can mouse wheel to zoom in/out.

Level Editor

• Use Paint or whatever image software you like to create a PNG file with a black background in the “Levels” directory. Levels don’t need to be huge to be fun; 100x100px is already enough, but you can create whatever size you want.
• Blue pixel (0,0,255): player (it’s the minimum requirement for a level to be playable)
• Red Pixel (255,0,0): enemy. Don’t put too much of them, it can slow down the game, but it depends on the power of your computer…
• Yellow Pixel (255,255,0): path for the enemies. An enemy will follow a path if he’s just NEXT TO a yellow pixel. You can use a single yellow pixel to make an enemy move to it an look in that direction.
• Grey Pixel (128,128,128): wall
• White Pixel (255,255,255): goal (sword). You can set multiple goals if you want
• Purple 1 (255,0,255) : life bonus
• Purple 2 (255,64,255) : ammo bonus
• Purple 3 (255,128,255) : bomb bonus
• Purple 4 (255,192,255): mine bonus
• Green (0,255,128): a cherry tree :)

Don’t hesitate to check out the available levels to get an idea of the color use. Be careful, you need to use the exact color codes (R,G,B) described above.