Glowing Ninja competition review by Rincewind

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General

Even though Ariel Yust is supposed to be full time in the Israelian army, he decided to enter the Boolean Soup competition anyway. He started this game called “Glowing Ninja”, and during the competition he showed us some pretty drawings in his worklog containing nice pixel art, attracting the attention of Boolean Soup visitors.

Half way the competition die-hard game programmer Eckolin joined him to take over the programming work, and so they made a pretty strong team with Ecko specialised in programming and Ariel in drawing. The theme of the game is “Pirates and/or Ninjas”, and this means solely ninjas for this game.

When you start the game, you’re presented with a menu with the options “New game”, “Load”, “Credit” and “Exit”. “Credit” does nothing (but the credits are written on the game window’s bar), “load” loads a game that has been saved by the creators of the game and “New game” starts a new game.

I chose “new game”.

Graphics

The menu is good looking. It has some kind of Japanese-like flag above the menu buttons with some ninja weapons attached to it. Bamboo grows on both sides of the menu, and throwing stars are engraved in the wood underneath the menu buttons.

A graphical introduction would’ve been nice with 4 months of time on you hands, especially since Ariel mentioned in his worklog he would make one. But apparantly Ariel and Ecko ran out of time, just as the other competitors. Once again wise that these guys did not start making an intro movie without having the game finished first: it’s all about priorities.

But let’s get to the game itself. The graphics in this game are all pixel art except for a menu on the right of the screen with decorations and a mini map. The decorations consist of several katana’s and some more shurikens, which all look very nice. You’ll also find some mysterious buttons on the right, which carry only an icon of a chinese/heart/money/food but no text to explain what the button stands for. This is a problem, but I’ll come to that later. The minimap shows what parts of the map are ruled by which (human/cpu) player, indicated with player colors. This looks pretty good.

Because the game itself consists of pixel art and the game is running in a window, it turned out it was all too small for me to decently see. I am running the absurd resolution of 1400*1050 on my rather small 15” monitor. And I can’t even help it because it is the TFT screen’s native resolution. Even though the full screen button was blacked out, I luckily managed to make the window go full screen by pressing alt + enter. This made it all a lot more visible.

There is only one game map. This map is rather grassy with some rocks, and some trees can also be found spread around the map. While the landscape tile are certainly well drawn, the landscape is rather naked and there isn’t much variaton in tiles, the trees for example are rather repetitive. On the map you will find several good looking towns in different colors with one being red which is the player’s color. Selecting your town enables you to click on the chinese head icon or the heart icon in the menu, which makes a nice red scroll with a statistics graph show up! This is actually a graphical view of the amount ‘happiness’ (the heart) and the population (the chinese head) over time. I like the idea.

There are character graphics for a couple of different units that can be built (after a lot of hassle, see gameplay). These units look very nice, and they’re animated when they fight. The fighting and walking of these units happens very quickly, which looks kind of funny. At least this keeps the game at a decent pace, which is a good thing. You can build face to face units, and units which fire projectiles from a distance.

Gameplay

First of all this game left me in awe wondering what the hell this game was doing. No readme came with the game and with all these icons without text descriptions it was hard to see what everything was for exactly. I figured that the hour glass progressed a turn, pressing it was a joy. The other buttons could only be pressed when your own town was selected. The heart and chinese-guy icons showed scrolls with the happiness and population, whatever these were good for. Closing these scrolls has to be done by clicking on the playing map, which unselects your town too, which isn’t really handy. Clicking on the scroll itself would have been more convenient. (Edit: it turns out right mouse clicks works as opposed to left mouse click, excuse me ;))

I also more or less figured out that the slider that appears when you click the money button divides working power in love and money & population (I think). The slider that appears when you press the food button apparantly is meant to distribute working power over love and food, iron balls (no idea what that icon stands for) & population. I had no idea what the main slider did though.

One way or another, playing around a bit with it while advancing turns gives you a sense of what you should do, so not long after I had enough money to buy units. However, sadly there is a bug that keeps you from building units. You can click on a unit build button all you want, but nothing happens. However, I discovered that when you press the “load game” button in the game’s menu, you load an already already saved game (by the creators) that does allow you to build units.

In combination with Ecko explaining me what everything meant, I came understood the game a bit more and easily managed to conquer the enemy cities. He explained to me for example that clicking on cattle/farms turns those industries on or off, and that workpower is distributed over the industries that are switched on. He also told me that the main slide bar is the percentage of workpower that goes to the food industry.

After building lots of units I sent my forces out to other towns, where they first defeated some enemy units that dared to get in their way. Then I captured these enemy towns by putting one or more units on a town for several turns. In the end, all towns were mine. My mini map was red.

The game is actually fun to play when you get it going, although it does require you to figure out all this initially ununderstable stuff. It’s just way too unfinished, half of the systems aren’t implemented and there is this bug with building units. Also victory comes pretty fast when you have a rough idea of what’s happening. A bit too fast even, perhaps.

Music & Sound

Well, there was no music nor any sound. Too bad, creating some sounds wouldn’t have taken up much time!


Conclusion

This game has potential and I slightly enjoyed winning once, but for now it’s just too unfinished to be decently playable. And I like strategy games, really. I was lucky to discover that after loading a game you can build units, so at least I finished a game and saw the battle system. For others though who would just make a new game this bug would’ve made the game unplayable. But eh I understand, not enough time. For the future I would certainly add text to the buttons everywhere, for them not to be so ununderstable.

One special mention is the idea of graphical representations for the population and happiness, I really liked that. The graphics are overall top notch, although the landscape tiles could use some more variation. One way or another this game could be awesome. And remember, it’s never too late to finish a game!