Slip into the role of a cyber ninja, fighting its way through enemy lines highly stylized virtual reality world using savage melee and ranged combat techniques.
Trailer
Goals
At the outset of conception, the team gathered around the idea of creating the most action-packed combat game available on mobile platforms. Cyber Ninja should deliver chanbara-like sword combat, intense shootouts like a John Woo movie and fully destructible environments, commemorative of the legendary Matrix lobby scene. Simply put, the game had to be highly accessible, yet challenging, varied and stylish enough that any player could feel like a futuristic ninja.
Specs
Screenshots
My Tasks
Introduction
CYBER NINJA was our attempt to create a mobile game that is more cut towards the mobile audience. Simple inputs and gameplay, yet fun and engaging. We wanted to stay quite basic with everything, but not blunt. Additionally, I still wanted to improve my skills for mobile development and see what we could get away with without killing performance. That's why the game is full of physics objects. From walls and props breaking apart, barrels exploding, and throwing ragdolls across the screen.
On top of that, I created the GUI again and was responsible for a bunch of visual effects and shaders.
Physics and Performance
Playing around with physics is always fun because of its unpredictable nature. Letting walls explode and enemies fly around while all their limbs just twitch around uncontrollably is inherently funny. So the first thing I did was testing and benchmarking. Check out what is possible on mobile devices. And even though mobile phones and tablets are quite capable and strong these days, we still wanted the game to run smoothly on old and weak devices.
I tried to optimize as much as possible by freezing and letting physics objects fall asleep as soon as they are no longer needed. I tried to keep the amount of physics objects as low as possible but as high as needed to achieve the wanted effects.
It took a bit of work, but in the end, I managed to make the game run with 60 fps on a Samsung Galaxy M11, which was a €100 phone back in 2021. And that was good enough for me.
Backend
The CYBER NINJA backend was pretty similar to Arknet's. We used Firebase yet again, though this time we didn't make much use of the storage/database. Instead we leaned even more into A/B testing and messaging for notifications.
The ads were handled the same as in Arknet, with the difference that we now utilized banners more and also made use of strategically placed buttons for rewarded ads. E.g., doubling the amount of currency collected after finishing a level.
And since I was always eager to try out the hottest and newest things, I implemented a couple of Google-specific packages as well. So I implemented in-app reviews and in-app updates into the game as soon as support for Unity got released.
Technical Art
Since this project also got created with the Universal Render Pipeline, I wanted to dig deeper into its tools and capabilities. So I dove deeper into renderer features and created small effects that could get applied onto the player. Like a silhouette shader when getting obscured by walls and props. Or a ghostly shader when using the stealth upgrade.
GUI
In this project, I made more use of world-space UI, like the health bar hovering over the player. Or the currency counter when running over coins.
Additionally, I utilized even more tweening magic than in Arknet to make the UI as bouncy and fun as possible. A lot of animations and smooth transitions got created to make the experience as seamless and fluid as possible.
Post Mortem
CYBER NINJA was definitely a game more fitting for mobile devices. It was really fun developing and also playing it. I wouldn't say I learned as many new things on this project as I did on previous ones. But this project definitely helped me to improve some of my skills and helped me work on my efficiency. This was a really quick project; we released the game just a couple of months after starting development. After that, we kept updating the game constantly.
The game definitely received more attention than Arknet, which was nice.
I quit my job at Reija, and therefore, during the support phase of this project. Later on, the development of the project came to a halt as well.