Nano Ninja - LOWREZJAM

[marclurr]

Hello,

I decided to make an entry for Lowrezjam this year. It can be played in the browser on itch.io, I'll attach the .love file here as well. For anybody having a nose though the source code, please don't judge me!

I've been stuck in a bit of rut with regards to completing projects so I was hoping this would give me a kick in the right direction. I was originally planning to make 9 levels with a boss after every third level but I ended up only making 3 levels and a single boss. Overall I'm reasonably pleased with how it's turned out but I'd appreciate any feedback, however harsh. Anyone with a bit of experience playing platformers should blitz through it. Controls are:

Keyboard Layout A:
Movement: A/D
Jump: J
Attack: K

Keyboard Layout B:
Movement: Left/Right arrows
Jump: X
Attack: C

XBox Controller:
Movement: D-Pad
Jump: A
Attack: X

If using the keyboard, just use the controls you prefer, there is no configuration screen.

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[togFox]

Nice work. I played the web version. Nice work with the animations. Paralax. Low res low bits low everything. You should be happy with that.

[marclurr]

Thanks for the kind words, art is something I definitely struggle with. It took me so long to get the purple ninja moving in a fairly convincing way that I couldn't stomach doing it again for the enemies, and if you made it to the boss you'll notice he's essentially static aside from the dissolve animation

[ReFreezed]

Very Ninja Gaiden. This is quite nice for a small jam game. Good job!

One thing I felt was missing: a health bar for the boss. When hitting him I wasn't sure I was actually dealing damage. I looked in the top right corner of the screen and thought the bars showed the boss' health (I realized those were lives in the second playthrough).

A nitpick: if I hold right before the level starts then the character doesn't move until I release and press the key again.

[marclurr]

Thanks for the playing. It will probably come as no surprise that I was playing Ninja Gaiden the day before I noticed the jam I originally implemented the same climbing controls as the original NES game, but my girlfriend had real trouble with the climbing so I changed it slightly.

And thanks for the feedback. I was planning to put in a boss health bar but after I'd got it working this morning I wanted to check the web build and ended up spending the rest of the morning tracking down a problem specific to that build - I was lazy an used a goto statement to break out of a for loop. I'm not sure what Love.js does in this case but the symptom was the offending .lua file not being included in the build.

As for the input quirk; this is another problem I was planning to address in the final couple of hours. It's related to how the input abstraction I have works. It doesn't do any input polling in the main loop and relies only on pressed/released events. The data is reset when game states are changed which is clears any buttons that were previously held. It was either that or have an unintended jump when entering the game! It needs a bit of a rewrite really, as I wrote it when I was new to the framework.

Edit: Regarding the goto: it just occurs to me that Lua has a break statement. It's continue it doesn't have.

[Gunroar:Cannon()]

Really good accomplishment, lowrez and everything. Managing to complete it, with cool graphics, on nice.