The game is basically an endless runner. Except instead of avoiding obstacles and collecting coins, you’re avoiding ninja stars while throwing your own stars at other ninjas.
There are a few different enemy types and bosses. There’s also a unique summoning system executed by drawing patterns on the screen. Summon spells are obtained in scrolls, scrolls are earned by defeating bosses.
Controls are easy, tilt the device like a steering wheel to move left/right. Jump with the left button, throw your stars with the right.
The game will record your distance, score and highest combo (combos will also earn you score multipliers, so keep them up!).
I hope you can enjoy this game! I spent a lot of time working on it pretty much by myself. It can get lonely, frustrating and very hard - especially if you have no prior experience doing this sort of thing. I’ve created music before, I’ve created graphics before, I’ve created 3D before, and I guess you could say I’ve done some limiting scripting before from making websites. But I’ve never tackled a full game before!
Special thanks go out to my partner for the brush work and my friends for testing! And thanks to Unity for being such an awesome product!
Actually, it’s your shader :). Am I supposed to credit you for that somewhere? I will add that into the next update if so.
I did make some changes though. Mostly just editing the toon shade graphic to be top-down lighting instead of right-left. This suited my environment better.
Ironically, I think mostly I’m not using your outline shader (though I did edit it to allow for thicker outlines to suit my style). This was mainly because by the time I found your shader, I had already done the duplicate inverted mesh method for outlines ;).
Hi,
It is great to see Toon Shader used in published games
Using duplicated inverted meshes certainly helps lowering the draw calls, it is just less flexible. Btw, using this technique, can you define alternative colors than black for the outline ( I am curious - never tried it so far ) ?
Also I am curious to see the toon shade you used - if you do not mind.
You are not supposed to mention that you are using Toon Shader but I would appreciate a lot if you did
Best luck with your project,
-Ippokratis
No, with the dup invert mesh technique, the outline mesh UVs are simply put onto a black portion of the texture. I suppose if I created another color on the texture, I could put those UVs onto that instead. But it’s not editable via Inspector or anything, which I assume you’re asking.
I’ve attached the texture I used. I went from the 3 toned down to two, as I felt that suited my game better (all set at night, and no real light source in the game [ignoring fire effects]). I tweeked it quite a times to get the proportions/contrast of lit to shadow just right for my game. I would recommend others do the same for their games, as I found each visual style requires just that little bit of change to make it work. Or at least, when it’s not an actual light source that is defining the shading.
The other unique thing I should mention is that there are 2 materials on each character. 1 for clothing, and 1 for skin. You can see this in effect in the options menu, where you can alter both the clothing color and the skin tone for your character (what is essentially done for the enemies). Every enemy in the game uses the same 2 materials, while the player’s materials are slightly altered (he’s got no sleeves, to help differentiate him from the others). This meant that I have litereally 4 textures for the characters when it’s just player vs enemies, regardless of how many are on screen. I know it’s not good practice to have more than one material/texture on a rigged mesh, but with my very low poly count I figured I could take the hit in order to get the effect I was after.
The exceptions to the above are the enemies with additional components (kites, turtle shells, hats).
The 1.01 update just hit the App Store. There’s some minor bug fixes which are detailed in the change log on iTunes, but the main feature for all here will be the Time Jutsu scroll. If you felt the scrolls were too hard to perform previously, this should help as it slows down time for 3 seconds.
Yes, Menu → Play is the only way currently. I will add a Restart option in the next update, it just wasn’t a high priority in order to get the game out the door.
