The Ninja Blog

Here’s one for all you old schoolers – Wizard Smash: “One wizard’s quest to rid the land of a curse by hitting it in the face”

Controls:

Movement: arrow keys
Swing mace: arrow keys
Mace control mode: z
Jump: x
Exit door: down arrow

Mechanics:

It’s a pretty standard retro platformer, except the player has no attack and is instantly killed when touching an enemy or enemy projectile from any direction. In order to attack, you need to swing the dispel mace into an enemy. This is primarily done by positioning, since the mace is always orbiting freely around the wizard.

The levels are randomly generated on every playthrough, and a simplified AI director is responsible for positioning enemies.

The green bar at the top is your progress through the evil keep, which goes up when you’re going the right way and down when you’ve been forced to backtrack (IE hit an enemy). As it fills up, special enemies become more frequent. When it hits 8 full boxes, there will be a boss battle, but that’s not in there yet

The red bar is the final boss’ HP. It’s always displayed, since it only goes back up if you’ve been forced to backtrack a lot. Of course this is all speculation at this point

Enemies:

Hench Toast: toaster minions. Will either march back and forth or shoot burnt toast in your direction.

Hatba: Flying hats that swoop around

Lampet: Lamps that hang off the ceiling and shoot lightning

Zombies: Spawn in large groups and march towards the player, jumping over short obstacles.

Monkey air raids: A swarm of winged monkeys flies across the screen. The top and bottom row of walkable tiles are guaranteed to be safe from monkeys.

The wicked witch of the worst: The witch that made the curse! Casting fire magic makes her lower her shield for a few seconds.

This is a difficult and unforgiving platformer with a lot of humor. The game regularly feeds you little gems like “expect to die a lot” and it’s true.

Play Wizard Smash on Ninja Kiwi now!

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

This week we’re proud to bring you a really sweet new action RPG game. Vertical Drop Heroes offers up the perfect blend of RPG with the “falling down a big hole” genre.

In the game you start out as a regular Joe but you “rescue” heroes locked in cages (stamp on them to smash through and free). As you do this your character will take on the class of the hero you freed. There are 5 different classes that are free-able but releasing heroes of the same class as you are currently will allow you to level up that class making you more resilient and more powerful.

Completing levels (getting to the exit) allows you to progress as well as unlock new character masks. In addition there are 30 different magical artifacts and 3 gameplay modes including, wait for it, multiplayer (shared keyboard) which is exceptionally fun

Trust me, play Vertical Drop Heroes now!

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

We are proud to announce another Ninja Kiwi game on the iTunes app store!

Bloons Super Monkey was a massive hit on the web and now it’s available for iPhone, iPad and iTouch on the iTunes app store. Use your finger on the touch screen to move Super Monkey around to pop as many bloons per wave as possible. As with the web game, each bloon releases power blops that can be collected and spent on powerful upgrades for your Super Monkey.

Can you pass all 15 waves?

Get Bloons Super Monkey here

Boy, this thing started out simple and got really complicated quickly. I was playing something like this in an arcade with my wife and thought it’d make an awesome flash game, a great first multi-player game to cut our teeth on.

Counter Snipe, grew into a more complicated project, to get everything going right we needed a lot more messing about (and complete rewrites) than we’d planned on. Nevertheless the game is pretty cool, if I do say so myself.

Counter Snipe pits you, a sniper, against another sniper. This is white knuckle time as the fear grips you. Who will eat a bullet first?

The game offers a single player mode to get you used to how the game works and to get a feel for new guns you unlock. Each gun is different and people will have their own favourites. In addition, the guns all have attachment upgrades in the form of recoil pads, flash suppressors, bipods and more. Each one will affect individual guns in subtle ways.

Once you’ve gotten the hand of single player you can venture into the unforgiving, merciless world of multiplayer. Everyone here is after two things: Cash and XP, and the get both from decorating the walls with a new colour called “hint of you”.

Play Counter Snipe and rule!

For more info on Ninja Kiwi games follow us on twitter here or join our facebook fan page!

OK so now that a few people have worked out the secret, here’s a video of it all revealed in it’s glory

Apologies for the sound, I don’t know what happened there

OK so someone recently wheedled this information out of me and I thought I’d better do an official post to, well, make it official.

We have started work on SAS: Zombie Assault 3. I’ve mentioned that we are in early planning stages, and I guess we are actually a little beyond that. This is a huge project, mainly because we’ve bitten the bullet and decided that this game really needs multiplayer.

I can’t tell you too much about how it will all work because we have a ton of work to do on this all but first off the bat, multiplayer will be Co-op only, no PvP nonsense. You’ll be teamed up with fellow players in a mission or missions that will involve plenty of mass-slaughter of zombies.

Don’t push me for a release date, as I said the project is huge. I’d love to release this before December 2010, but I am a terminal optimist and have been drastically wrong in the past

For more info on our games or to join the discussion join our facebook group here —>

As mentioned previously, we’ve had so much demand for more BTD and with our schedule commitments and the fact that Bloons TD5 simply has to be a whole lot better, we’ve decided to pull this thing together for you all.

Bloons TD4 Expansion includes:

4 all-new free maps +

Deflation Mode

and another new feature called “Specialist”. This little brainwave allows you to specialise in a certain tower type, for example “Classic” allows you to specialise in Dart Monkeys, Tack Towers and Boomerang Throwers. When you do this the cost of those towers and upgrades is reduced by 20% and all other towers and upgrades is increased by 10%. This adds a really neat level of flexibility to your gameplay and allows you to pick a style to suit the track and to really stretch out into different strategies.

Have fun people, play Bloons TD4 Expansion now!

Oh, there is one other thing, and it’s kind of a secret

For more info on Ninja Kiwi Games including sneak peeks and discussion, join our Facebook fan page here —>

YES.

Due to the fact that BTD5 is unlikely to hit your screens until late 2011, and the seriously HUGE demand for more, we had this brainwave that we’d release a BTD4 expansion. We’ll be bringing you 4 all new tracks as well as a new game mode called “Deflation Mode”. There are no new towers but you’ll also see some other neat additions

Coming soon. Like quite soon.

Chris

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

PS, here’s the pic I posted on the new facebook group

Our latest sponsored game is Galaxy Jumper. If you’ve played Escape the Red Giant, the gameplay mechanic will feel vaguely familiar however where “Giant” excels in beauty and simplicity, Galaxy Jumper’s strong point lays in the increasing depth of the puzzle.

The idea is to collect all the keys to unlock the exit. Do so AND collect enough coins to “buy” the next level and you can proceed. Fail to do either and it’s back to school for you. Life gets complicated with the introduction of moving later walls and greeblies that chase you and positively murderous when things start heating up under your feet if you stay still for too long.

Enjoy and suffer Galaxy Jumper!

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

OK so the second game from 1-Up is now live. BeatStreak3000 is now live!

This time it’s a musical, spaced-out version of Rock Paper Scissors – Defense game style. BeatStreak3000 was made in 2 weeks from go and features some pretty impressive work.

Beat my score 25,711,528 heh heh.

Play BeatStreak3000 now!

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