The Ninja Blog

Just put this game up – Starcraft 2 Tower Defense by the guys at starcraft2.pro.  Not official in any way but I think you’ll agree a superb effort at creating a game based on another game that hasn’t been released yet! 40 waves, 5 towers, 15 upgrades per tower. Defend against hordes of brand new Terran units. This game is hard but fun. Play Starcraft 2 TD.

This puzzle game will have you addicted not just to wanting to pass each new level, but to the simple and satisfying game mechanic. You dribble coloured inks into little buckets to fill them up. Groups of three full buckets will explode into points – tetris style. Look carefully at what ink colour is coming next, as the wrong coloured ink will just pass through any buckets that already have another colour in them.

The early levels are really fun and easy, so just take your time and enjoy! Play Fuli now.

Just put this new game up – amazingly detailed Action RPG in the vein of Diablo 2 and others. Contains the usual stuff, quests, loot, experience, skill ups and loads of monsters. Have a play of Arcuz.

Stephen

Boy 2009 was a big year for us. We started out the year as four full-timers and ended the year as seven. Interestingly the development timeframe of games seems to stretch a little with each new employee and we now spend around 6-8 man-months on a game. Several games coming in 2010 will be even longer.

SAS: Zombie Assault 2 was our first foray into longer, more polished and more in-depth games. It was also our first game to use in-game micro payments which we hoped would help to fund the much longer development time and we were right, the game was a success. While we’re conscious of continuing to make games that are entirely free to play (and beat) the development of the micro-payment model has allowed us to stretch ourselves in terms of game quality and will allow us to experiment a little with things like multiplayer and different types of games. We’re especially appreciative of our fan support which by and large has accepted this development in the flash gaming world.

One of the low points in 2009 was the closure of My Ninja Kiwi. I know there are plenty of people that miss it and we still have mixed feelings about it all. Unfortunately the initial planning of MYNK was a little shortsighted and the site grew into a sickly behemoth that we had to put to sleep.  Thoughts for 2010? We MAY have another look at how to give something more robust to our fans to play with but we’ll definitely have to do some serious planning before comitting.

So what’s in store for 2010?

Given BTD4 was such a huge hit with fans and critics alike, it seems a certainty that we’ll start work on BTD5. We’re exhausted at the thought but already have a pretty good list of ideas of how to push the game in new end exciting directions. Keep your eyes peeled for an upcoming competition we’re going to set up to get even more ideas for BTD5.

We’ll also re-look at SAS multiplayer. I know I posted previously that it wasn’t going to happen but for some reason the noise from fans asking from multiplayer has increased as a result of that post, not decreased. It seems inevitable that we’ll have to put our fears aside and tackle this in ‘10. See, we do listen to you (even if I don’t reply to every comment in the blog). Fans of the SAS series will also have a couple more games to look forward to. More on those later!

We have 3 new games in the pipeline now, two of which you should see before the end of January and a bunch more on the drawing board. 2010 is going to be chocka!

So from all of us here at Ninja Kiwi we wish you a very happy and safe New Year, and we look forward to bringing you more of the best games of 2010!

Chris

Ok, so the game is out – and you like it hopefully, otherwise you wouldn’t be reading this guide. The purpose of this guide is to provide some basic game information for new players and some general strategies and methods for beating the game on the simpler tracks and difficulty settings. I will follow up this guide with an advanced player’s guide later that will include some in depth game analysis including statistics and properties of the Towers.

General Game Info

There are 6 tracks plus another 7 extra tracks that you can purchase using MochiCoins. The tracks vary in challenge from very easy to very hard, and there are 3 difficulties you can play on for every track. The difficulty rating affects how much money you start with, how many lives you have and how many rounds you need to pass to win the game; 50 on easy with 200 lives, 60 on medium with 150 lives and 75 on hard with just 100 lives. New players should probably start with the first or second track on easy. Players who enjoyed BTD3 could start on the 3rd or 5th tracks, as they aren’t super hard, but are something quite different to what you’re used to.

Bloon Types

BTD4 brings 4 new bloon types to the game, each special and mean in its own way. But for completeness, here is a list of each bloon type and its properties:

• Red Bloon – the simplest bloon in the game. Moves slowly and only needs to be popped once to be removed forever. This is the bloon by which all others are compared. The Red Bloon Equivalent or RBE is a measure of how tough a given Round is, telling you how many ‘pops’ you will need to pass the level.
• Blue Bloon – moves slightly faster than red, and when popped, contains a Red Bloon.
• Green Bloon – moves faster than blue, and spawns a Blue when popped.
• Yellow Bloon – moves fast and creates a Green in its place when popped.
• Pink Bloon – a new type to BTD4, moves even faster than Yellow, is even bigger and of course contains 1 Yellow when popped. Be careful as these guys can take you by surprise with sheer speed.
• Black Bloon – small and sometimes hard to hit, contains 2 Pinks. Black Bloons are immune to bombs and bomb type effects, so remember to vary your tower selections.
• White Bloon – similar to black except White Bloons are immune to Ice Towers. Contain 2 Pinks.
• Zebra Bloon – Zebras are nasty, and new to BTD4, they combine the effects of Black and White Bloons, making them immune to freezing and bomb effects. They move fast and contain 1 Black and 1 White Bloon.
• Lead Bloon – Everyone’s favourite to love to hate, the Lead Bloon is immune to anything sharp including darts, tacks, spikes, boomerangs and more. They have only 1 redeeming feature – they move slowly. Lead Bloons contain 2 Black Bloons, thus requiring a bomb to ‘break open’ and then anything but a bomb to finish off.
• Camo Bloon – These are new to BTD4 as well. Camos are dealt with very easily so long as you plan and don’t panic. Camos will not be targeted by any tower that cannot ’see’ them. Luckily there are several upgrades in the game that allow nearby towers to see Camos. If you find yourself with no way to spot them, simply select Road Spikes and lay them near your towers. The projectiles from your towers that target the visible Bloons may break open more Camos. If you play it right, you may only need one or two Road Spikes to clear a Camo round – if you have no other way to see them. Mortar Towers can also be retargeted to hit Camo Bloons. In addition, Monkey Aces attack automatically, so if you’re lucky, the Camos will fall to their powerful dart attacks.
• Rainbow Bloon – Contain 2 Zebras. They move fast and require lots of firepower to completely wipe out.
• Ceramic Bloon – These Bloons require 10 hits to break open and contain 2 Rainbow Bloons. You do not get money for damaging Ceramics, only destroying them. Ceramics move fast and although glue does stick to them, they are not slowed by it. This requires you to vary your strategy a little if you like going heavy with Glue Gunners or Monkey Glue.
• MOAB – Received an upgrade since BTD3, requiring 200 hits to break open. They contain 4 Ceramic Bloons which can make these hard to deal with without plenty of fast firing Towers such as Super Monkeys or Tacks. You can destroy them using only Road Spikes, but it’s not recommended unless you are making lots of cash from Banana Farms. MOABs move quite slowly. The MOAB Mauler upgrade for Bomb Towers is another useful way to take these down.
• BFB – These super sized MOAB look-a-likes are the most powerful thing the Bloons can throw at you. Each one requires 700 hits to destroy. Then, predictably, they contain 4 MOABs. This can mean that if your anti-MOAB towers are too clustered near the start, you may be in trouble. Luckily BFBs move very slowly.

Bloon Life Costs

When a Bloon escapes, you lose a life, plus an extra life for every Bloon contained within it. Higher ranked Bloons can take off dozens of lives if they escape:

• Red – 1 life
• Blue – 2 lives
• Green – 3 lives
• Yellow – 4 lives
• Pink – 5 lives
• Black – 11 lives
• White – 11 lives
• Lead – 23 lives
• Zebra – 23 lives
• Camo – 11 lives
• Rainbow – 43 lives
• Ceramic – 103 lives
• MOAB – 613 lives (yah… gameover)
• BFB – if you must know… 2884 lives

First Play Through

When you first play the game, you will notice that you only have access to Dart Monkeys. That’s ok, since they’re powerful enough to take you through the early levels, and you will rank up very quickly unlocking new towers along the way. After a couple of play throughs or so you should have reached rank 16, which is the point you will have unlocked all tower types, but not their level 5 upgrades. These get unlocked over the next 15 ranks along with 2 special game modes for advanced players. The level 5 upgrades for the towers are expensive but very powerful upgrades that make the tower useful even in the later rounds.

Basic Strategy

For the easier tracks on easy difficulty, you  can just about use any towers you like to get to Round 50. Try placing towers at corners and intersection points so that they get to attack the Bloons for the longest period of time. It’s best to have a variety of towers that compliment each other well (more on that in our advanced guide) but in general just choose what looks fun and enjoy it. The only vital moments in the game are introduction of Camo bloons and Lead Bloons. A single Camo Bloon appears on round 24. Camo Bloons will be ignored by any towers that can’t see them. To see a Camo Bloon, your tower must be in the radius of another tower that grants this ability. The 4 tower types that can do this are:

1. Monkey Beacon with the Level 4 upgrade called “Sonar Beacon”
2. Monkey Ace with the Level 3 upgrade “Spy Plane”
3. Monkey Buccaneer with Level 3 upgrade “Crow’s Nest”
4. Monkey Apprentice with special premium upgrade “Crystal Ball” (requires mochicoin purchase)

However by round 24 you may not have any of these things, in which case simply use a dose of Road Spikes when the Camo Bloon is near your other towers. The Camo will pop and your towers will clean up the rest. Round 33 has 50 Camos so you should make sure you have at least one of the above detector towers by then. Lead Bloons appear on round 28, and they’re only popped by explosives. If you forget to have a Bomb Tower or similar, use a couple of Exploding Pineapples instead. Place them a short way ahead of the Lead Bloons so that they explode as the Bloons pass over them.

M.O.A.Bs

On round 46 you get your first MOAB. If you haven’t unlocked the Level 5 Bomb Tower upgrade called MOAB Mauler, your next best option is to use a Super Monkey to take it down. The MOAB Mauler upgrade is powerful, but you might need more than 1 to safely destroy the MOAB. If you have neither a Super Monkey or Maulers, you can help your other towers by putting Road Spikes down in front of the MOAB. This is expensive, but it could save you from losing the game.

The next part of this Bloons Tower Defense 4 Walk Through will cover more advanced strategy for beating the harder tracks on higher difficulties, including correct usage of Banana Farms, when is best to use Boomerangs instead of Tack Towers, and a break down of the overall effectiveness of Super Monkey vs other towers. The next guide will also have stats for each tower type including how many Bloons they can pop with each shot.

Potion Panic 2 is here, and live! (see my last post on this here—>)

PP2 is all about making potion mixtures to defend your base. While the “defend your base” mechanic isn’t original, the DIY nature of the defense certainly is. As you progress through the game you’ll earn cash to purchase vat refills and upgrade your powers. You’ll earn enough in the course of the game to either max out in one area, or beef up everything to a lesser extent. I’m keen to hear the paths that you guys prefer.

Different monsters generally have different weaknesses. While the skeletons are easily smashed to bits with the stone chunks generated by the pur red mixtures, the Croco-Beetles take a lot of pounding to kill with solids. They will however, melt like butter under acidic mixtures like pure yellow (Y) or beefier liquids like YYRR.

My favourite mix would have to be RRRYY, which creates a pulsating purple clump of jelly. It doesn’t do anything itself but creates quite an explosion when ignited with YRB or any flaming mix. While some potions (YYBBR) appear to do nothing, (in this case a sticky tar that cannot be ignited) they do have their uses.

Anyway I think this game is awesome and I hope y’all enjoy it too

Play Potion Panic 2 now!

For more info on Ninja Kiwi Games follow us on twitter here—>

Defend yourself from the waves of weird and terrible beasts by mixing your own unique killer potions. Smash them with rocks, dissolve them with acid, or asphyxiate them with vapours. Discover dozens of unique and fun recipes to use against the attacking monsters. Save your recipes for instant use later or simply use the random potion for a messy surprise. Buy upgrades to increase your potions potency, or MochiCoins upgrades for some really powerful premium stuff! Mix, shoot, defend!

Hi all, since BTD4 we’ve been beavering away here and have a couple of crackerjack games in the pipeline. One is almost there, the looooong awaited sequel to Potion Panic (which was released 940 days ago. You can tell how far we’ve come .

Potion Panic 2 basically takes the same concept as the original and makes it work better, and look a hell of a lot better as you’ll see below.

Some nice dribbly acid to melt the nasties. Hello, what's that purple stuff? I wonder what happens if I ignite it?

Some of the text fields etc need polishing up a bit…

Zabamm! Muhahahaha...

That's a cool one, I call it rain of pain It's an explosion of nasty rocks...

Giant Slug meets pool of acid.

As you can see we have as usual had a blast making the game. Shouldn’t be too far off now. For those of you out of practice or who have never played, get some game time up your sleeve with Potion Panic here.

For more info on Ninja Kiwi games follow us on twitter here—>

Red Storm is an awesome top-down shooter where you control a gun laden robot. Whilst that should be enough for you to give a girlish giggle and go straight to playing, I’ll give a bit more info about it here.

The game has been modeled by the developers off a popular Mech-Warrior type game, where the objective is to blow heaps of stuff up and continuously upgrade your robot. Red Storm, offers a smooth gameplay experience and there are plenty of upgrades. I found the game pretty tough to begin with. It’s sometimes hard to come across extra health packs when you need them, although you do get fully recharged once you go up a level (this also isn’t super-easy, after about 30 minutes of play I think I was level 5).

The story is a little confusing, although there are a bunch of comic-style screens at the beginning that probably explain things. I’m just not the sort of person that wants/needs 6 pages of “next” before getting into blowing things to bits

Take my advice, give Red Storm a play.

For more info on Ninja Kiwi Games follow us on twitter here—>

After the release of Bloons TD3, we got an email from some students in the US that wanted to make up a few Super Monkey caps. Not for sale but just their own personal use. We thought it was hilarious and that it was a neat idea that someone liked the game enough to do that.

We all agree that BTD4 really does take things to the next level but were quite unprepared for this…

Is that someone from Dragon Ball Z to the left?

Yes, someone has permanently inked their body with Dart Monkey, Super Monkey and Sun-God upgrade from BTD4. I can’t say I recommend doing this, a tattoo is pretty darn permanent. But the idea of this guy at 85 years old with a super monkey tattooed on him make me think that the future is going to be a pretty darn interesting place, hoverboards or none.

For more updates on people inking their skin with Ninja Kiwi game characters follow me on twitter here–>

This is a neat idea, and no, strictly speaking it’s not a level editor. But the idea of unique user input into the most efficient way to complete a level is cool.

In Level Editor you have the usual WASD or arrow key controls over a character (admittedly not a very interesting character, the weak point of the game) starting at A and trying to get to the exit, B.

In order to get to the exit you essentially need to complete the building of the level by placing static, moving, dissolving blocks etc. Difficulty ramps up to a medium point, the game is never especially challenging but enjoyable enough.

The original gameplay is what gives this game the feature, personally I’d like to see the end of stick figures in flash (with one notable exception) and if a sequel comes along please give us an actual character!

Enjoy Level Editor here, as opposed to here

For more info on Ninja Kiwi Games follow us on twitter here—>