New iOS Game by SA indie

edited in Projects
Hey guys,

I just finished an iOS title with the help of a good friend of mine.

It's just been released on iTunes, if you're interested, maybe have a look!

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/smash-ninja/id551630966

If you want to help me make some twitter noise about it, please use

#SmashNinja #iOSApp

Thanks guys!
Shane

Comments

  • Hi and welcome :)

    Do you have any video of the game up? I'm curious about the gameplay, but not $1 curious just yet... I imagine that video of the game would help other people find it as well.

    What are your plans regarding building awareness? Have you got any review exposure yet?
  • What @dislekcia is trying to say is that marketing is one of the important parts of making a game, if you'd like to have it be more than just for your own fun.

    And that doesn't mean you have to spend money to market, having the parts in place to market is important.

    A video is invaluable - show gameplay so that when you tell people about it, they don't have to "take your word for it". iTunes app pages are only moderately ok for me to decide about a game.

    Have you posted on TouchArcade's upcoming threads? Have you contacted any news/blogs etc and offered them a free demo? Any kind of exposure can help.

    Of course if you've already thought of these things I'm just blabbering pointlessly :P

    Asking "if you want to help me make some twitter noise about it" - give us something to tweet about! :D
  • Sorry, am I sounding all corporate and terrifying again? My bad.
  • Hey guys

    Thanks for the responses!

    Fosho, I'm actually working on a gameplay video at the moment. After release, I realised that pictures help ,but a video is definitely the way to go. I'll hopefully finish it by this weekend. First draft is finished, just working through some crit areas.

    I've also posted on a few review locations, and submitted the app for review - still waiting on a response. One can imagine that with the volume these guys receive, it'll take some time.
    Hopefully once the video is done, it'll help get the proper message across.

    I'll be back here with the link for a video so we can tweet together haha.

    Thanks guys!
  • Here we go! Took me a little longer than expected, but it finally done,

    Smash Ninja Gameplay Trailer
    http://youtu.be/_NrNjM_S2d0

    Enjoy!
  • Yay, gameplay!

    Your animation at the end is really kickass, I'm wondering if the trailer should open with that... Also, I dunno if you saw what the Ninja Crash video did, but ending off with how people find your game is always a good idea. Who are you going to push the trailer at now?

    Gameplay wise (and I do realise that this might be a bit too late, feel free to tell me to shut up) I'm not really certain what the bar on the right does, is it some kind of tap modifier? About the only thing I'd consider adding to what you've already got there would be a change of pace with popup collectibles: Make them fly around after you touched them, leaving a trail behind that you had to follow with your finger. Obviously you'd pause the timer while this was happening and you'd either get a reward or punishment for not concentrating hard enough when you completed the follow trail/messed up. The switch between the little guy psyching up and meditating would be pretty neat :)
    Thanked by 1Shane
  • Hi @Shane,

    DISCLAIMER : I suck at making videos :P

    But I'm not going to let that stop me from trying to help. I agree with @Dislekcia about starting the video with the end animation, or just something flashy to get the viewer excited. There are also three screens that tell you something about the game, I would like if it was more interleaved witht the game play. Somehthing like "Ninjas Chop thorugh fruit" -> And then I see a Ninja chopping thorugh fruit. And maybe push your studio splash screen to the end?

    But the game looks interesting. I need to ask because I only own an i-Nothing, but is the idea to tap the screen to charge your power before the timer runs out? And do you get extra power for hitting the floating orbs?
    Thanked by 1Shane
  • Hey hey, picked this up on the QCF iPad. Feedback incoming:

    1. I had no idea what the options screen was about. I thought you might be trying not to use text, but then there was text elsewhere in the game. I assume the different colour shuriken are difficulty settings? If the menu options had labels, it would go a long way :)

    2. There's very little to tell me that I should be tapping to continue through the intro text. Some sort of "tap to continue" indicator would be good. Sometimes I'd tap and there was clearly some sort of timer going on that was stopping me progressing, because I could tap and progress after a bit of a wait. Maybe adding the time to wait onto the tap to continue indicator might be an idea?

    3. Sometimes you switch between tap anywhere and tap this button to continue. Might be an idea to standardise that.

    4. As soon as I got to the actual gameplay, the game slowed down to a crawl. 1 or 2 frames per second. No idea what caused it, tried playing at 1x and 2x resolution, didn't seem to make any difference (running on an iPad2). The tapping animations didn't show (I know they're not just in the video from the first tutorial, this was on the egg level) and when it came time to break I got to watch the spinny animation frame by frame. It's a good animation - although looking at it slowly now I might add some effect highlights and possibly blurs to indicate which bodypart the ninja is hitting with, I doubt you'd see the difference between foot and fist strikes if it wasn't in slideshow mode ;)

    So yeah, the slowdown only seems to happen in the actual gameplay parts - the dude success screen is fine again. Banana level was similarly slideshow-y.
    Thanked by 1Shane
  • Aha! I let the game go into hibernate mode and then it seemed to be better once it came back. Although it does still slow down oddly sometimes, it's playable now.

    I also see that you've got drag chi balls, nice. The heavy slow time ones took me a while to get, sneaky! First time I didn't pass a level first time.
  • Hey guys, thanks for the responses, really value all kinds of feedback:

    @dislekcia - terribly sorry to hear about the bad user experience, I have an update thats been sitting in the app review queue (8 days now - should be approved any hour now hopefully), that improves performance a lot. I hate giving people a product that isn't up to par, so I apologise for that.

    The bar on the right is a tap modifier indeed, you pop the chi balls, and then when you activate it, then the taps get boosted for the duration of the screen fade. the higher the multiplier, the more the taps get boosted.

    I'll definitely look into implementing some of the gameplay aspects you've suggested in an update.

    Responding to points:
    1. I hoped that the text at the bottom when you click a button would help clarify things, especially with trying to keep all the buttons consistent throughout the game, but I'm going to have to re-look things. anytime someone is confused, is not good. Thanks for bringing it up.

    2 + 3. I'll remove the timers, and add in a button to enable you to progress through the text at your own pace. I don't want people getting confused or feeling restricted.

    4. I really hope the new update fixes the performance, I know on my iphone 3 it has some hiccups now and again, i really hoped it didnt affect the higher performance models. I've reduced the image sizes of the ninja animations from 1.2MB a file to 400kb, so hopefully that 60% reduction in size helps things out a lot.

    I really appreicate all the feedback from you guys, I'm going to get cracking on fixing up this mess before sending through my next update.

  • Adamantium arm.

    Bwahahaha :D
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