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About the Game

Ant Ninja was the 2nd year Game Development Workshop project of my studio, Top Hat Games, at UOIT. As is the way of the GDW, me and a studio of four other people had two semesters to make a complete 3d game in C++, using skills from the courses we were taking at the time.

It is a side-scrolling vaguely metroidvania-ish 3d platformer. You can climb on walls and ceilings, punch and jump on enemies, and find and collect powerups to allow you to doublejump and to break through spider webs. Also featured are really quite nice particle effects, screen space ambient occlusion, mesh skinning, shiny cell shading, and just a touch of bloom.

The plot of the game (which, sadly, is not very well exposed on the game itself) goes something like this:

You are a young ninja-in-training named Anastasia. You belong to an ancient ninja clan who learns their ways from the insects. However, as you embark on your coming of age journey, you discover that the colony of ants you are to learn from has been ravaged by an ant-zombifying fungus! You must then fight the zombie ants, learn new skills, and save as many eggs as you can in order to attempt to save the colony.

The game is not finished to the degree that we originally intended; namely, it does not have an end, as such, but you can try to get both powerups and explore everywhere they let you go. Backtracking is required. There are four separate areas altogether.

Note

In the blurb for Mountain Kid I mentioned that I had been getting into component entity systems, and built one for Ant Ninja. This is true. I essentially built the game engine for Ant Ninja from scratch, and it is, indeed, component based and dynamic and flexible and all sorts of wonderful. It also takes other people some getting used to, and I probably put too much time into the early framework and didn’t leave enough time for actual gameplay and enemies and stuff, thus preventing us from getting to the scale of complexity where it’d be really really useful… but that’s all kind of hard to say.

It was an experience, that’s for sure.

Credits

Lead Programmer: Ben Whittaker
3D Artist: Chantal Horan
Producer: Tucker Alban
Level Designer: Rob Edmonds
2D Artist (second semester): Laura Burdi
2D Artist (first semester): Avril Croxen

© Top Hat Games
UOIT GDW 2013 - 2014