Spot the Ninja

Developed for Android

Spot the Ninja is a hidden object game in which the user attempts to locate a small, round ninja face among each of 85 different photographs.

THE CONCEPT

While on a ten-day overseas trip to Tokyo and Kyoto in Japan, I took hundreds of pictures. Looking through them, I thought some of the places I’d snapped would be good hiding places for ninjas in a hide-and-seek game. The idea was simple, and I knew it would be appealing because, let’s face it, everyone loves ninjas.

PRODUCTION

I built the game in the Unity3D engine as I was familiar and comfortable with the GUI system. The only physical objects in-game would be the camera, music generator, and a particle system of cherry blossoms that sprouted each time the ninja was found.

Because there were a limited number of pictures suitable for the ninja face, I knew replay value would become an issue. To mitigate this, I divided them into several difficulty levels and added time limit modes. Each mode would be unlocked sequentially by user progress.

Spot the Ninja began production in October 2014 and was completed in April 2015.

CHALLENGES

The first significant hurdle I found myself facing was adequately balancing the difficulty levels. I knew if the ninja was placed randomly, the only real challenge would be time limits. As I had different testers go through the levels, I re-ordered some of them into different difficulties more than once.

Another attempt at my life came from ensuring each of the game’s variables were set and triggered when and how they were supposed to be. For example, some levels produced TWO ninjas rather than one, and late into production I discovered that returning to the main menu from the pause screen prevented the user from selecting any levels to play at all! Thankfully, these turned out to be as simple as a few clever “if” statements to fix.

POST MORTEM

If there’s one thing I can be sure of with each new game I create, it’s this: I am, and forever will be, still in school.

I’d thought I was an expert with Unity’s GUI system. This game generously assisted that notion in committing seppuku. Because 99% of the game is GUI, I ended up learning how to use several GUI-styles in one level, and how to organize them.

Writing clean and manageable code is, of course, always important. For this project, in which much of the game utilizes very similar scripting between the levels, I was painstakingly reminded of this fact each and every day.

AWARDS AND ACCOLADES

Spot the Ninja was entered into Missouri Southern State University’s first annual DevCon1 app and software competition. The app was awarded 2nd place and a prize of $1,000.