Shinobi Swipe
Shinobi Swipe is a one-on-one mobile fighter game where your goal is to defeat your opponent by swiping on the screen performing attack moves and combos before they defeat you. This was created as a group project for my 3D games programming module on my Master’s course and developed in Unity.
Showcased at Develop: Brighton 2019!
Shinobi Swipe was a group project created to reinforce knowledge of Unity and how polished a game could be made in a short time. I was responsible for AI, UI and Sound Design and Art. Being a group of 2 programmers who have 0 skill in art and working on a 2D game meant someone had to bite the bullet and mock something up. Using photoshop I created very simplistic art to create a Japanese setting with a variety of backdrops including a Dojo, Cliff, and a Ship. Each stage shows your progression going from apprentice to master. A small feature was added to show the previous stage in the background to show where you’ve come from. With levels designed, UI elements were created and used to create a menu system as well as a basic HUD to display player stats and have buttons to move and exit.
AI was one of the crucial parts to the game, as you needed to go up against an opponent. All actions were generic, allowing both player and AI to perform the same actions. To be scalable to different difficulties, thresholds were created that defined a chance to perform an action. Examples of thresholds include hit chance, block chance and flee chance. The easier the level, the lower the threshold making it less likely for the AI to perform a hit move and vice versa. The AI then measured their stats against the players and decided on whether to be offensive or defensive. Once decided, the AI would take that decision and roll a number out of 100, to be compared against the appropriate threshold to see whether they can perform it. An example AI decision might be to "focus" down the player. This might have occurred if the AI was on high stamina, meaning they are ready to unleash a couple moves. This put the AI into a "focused" state, doubling their threshold to hit. Once on low stamina, they would return to a normal state.
Sound Design wasn’t as crucial as other systems, but still important to build the world and indicate key moments in the game. All sounds were setup within a sound engine called FMOD, making integration of sound design easier along with varied sounds. Being a project under a small-time constraint an audio asset pack was found that contained all needed sounds from punches, kicks ambience and music.
An opportunity arose to showcase the game at Develop: Brighton 2019. The game then went into a second phase of development where a bunch of things were added, but one key game design was changed. Originally, ‘stamina’ was the player’s second stat. This worked by every move costing stamina making the player think about their moves in advance. However, after having a lot of people play the game, it was clear all it did was restrict the player from doing what they wanted which was spam moves, and those that had played the game for a bit realised one move was out right more powerful than the rest. Due to this, stamina was then scrapped and replaced by Chi. Rather than moves costing stamina they instead generated Chi. Combos were then changed to cost Chi, making them harder to use and preventing spamming of combos. This one change took the game from being a 3 move then wait, to a far more chaotic and fun move spam. This also had a bonus of making the AI feel more real, as they spent more time waiting on stamina before than attacking.
As the game was nearing completion and felt very polished it was decided to get it onto the Play Store. For this, a training level was required along with a tutorial to help properly teach the player the game. The main game mode was also turned into a Battle Mode, which was more of a fun allowing players to pick their own map and what difficulty opponent they wanted. The final decision was to mark the game as a demo, with the future possibility adding a story mode and more levels.