WolfNM

When I first decided I was going to make a 2D platformer I knew how I wanted the main character to feel and the actions that she was going to be able to do. She needed to be fast, have a sword attack, a projectile attack, a slide move, wall climbing and (as I was about 30 hours in Spider-man PS4 at the time) a grapple hook style move. Having the protagonist be a ninja made perfect sense, and a lot of the overall design of the game (both in terms of gameplay and visuals) came from that initial decision. I went deep into researching the real life history behind Ninja's and their techniques, the culture of Japan during the 1600s and their folklore creatures, a.k.a Yokai. While Destroy the Shogun, like most Ninja/Samurai games, is far from being strictly historically accurate, their are many things that I did choose to pull from directly. While the character design of Yuri is probably one of the least accurate things about the game (characters like your Sensei or Keiko are much closer to actual historical garb), the choice to have her wearing blue is accurate to life, rather than the black garb seen in a lot of popular culture. The bright red mask and scarf is inspired more by Strider however, as it makes for some great action shots in the cutscenes, but would stick out in an actual ninja stealth mission.

There are some deeper cuts however. The fact that Yuri (the player character) throws shuriken's overarm rather than straight out like in anime is taken straight from how real ninja would actually use them. All of the items you get along the way are also all things ninja would really use. Their are obvious ones like the sword (even if it was actually rare for real ninja to use them that often), shuriken, grapplehook, but the bombs, healing gourd and medicinal pellets are all things that are historically accurate too, right down to the look. Even the Shuko, the claws that you need to pick up in order to be able to scale walls, are based exactly on how ninja would do it. Granted, for real ninja they were mostly only to climb up wooden buildings, but it's obviously more fun in a game to climb on almost anything.

Hopefully you've enjoyed reading this little piece about the influences behind Destroy the Shogun. I plan to continue these blogs, going for in depth on the characters and settings, as well as some actual game design too. In the mean time, if you wanna check out the game itself, you can do so here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1676090/Destroy_The_Shogun/

Hey all! Welcome to my new series of blogs where I talk about the making of and influences behind my recently released 2D Action Platformer, Destroy The Shogun. By far the most common question I get on it is some variation of just 'how' so I thought I'd start there.

I programmed the game using a software called Game Maker Studio 2, which is tailored towards beginner programmers like myself, as it contains many built in ways to easily do many common elements such as animating sprites, moving objects, building tile sets etc. In order to actually learn how to program I followed Shaun Spaldings Platformer tutorial series (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izNXbMdu348&list=PLPRT_JORnIupqWsjRpJZjG07N01Wsw_GJ) during the making of my first game, A Squirrel's Tale. By the time I had done that I had a pretty decent grasp of most of GMS2's main functions and was able to do some slightly more advanced elements with DtS such as the main movement and abilities, some basic enemy AI and a full series of boss battles.

As for the art and music, well, I've been doing that stuff ever since my teen years at this point, so that wasn't a big leap. Writing music for a game soundtrack is pretty different to playing in a band however, so it took some adjusting to get things to work right on that front. Unlike with my bands, all the music in DtS was created entirely digitally using a mix of Garageband and BeepBox, and thankfully has gotten a lot of positive feedback. While art is nothing new for me, animation definitely was, so I spent a lot of time looking really closely at how other games animate, especially fighting games such as Smash Ultimate and Soul Calibur 6. The youtubers New Frame + (https://www.youtube.com/c/NewFramePlus) and Video Game Animation Study (https://www.youtube.com/c/DanRootVideoGameAnimation) thankfully make really great educational video's on the subject.

So that's it so far for this first blog, the following ones will probably go more into the influences behind the game so if you've got any questions about anything in the game don't hesitate to ask.

Destroy the Shogun on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1676090/Destroy_The_Shogun/

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