Hey everyone!

This is our first official devlog for Ninjas on Trampolines, the multiplayer fighting game where you play as ninjas and paint your opponents into the background. This week, we will introduce the game and talk about some recent additions. 

The Idea

Ninjas on Trampolines has been in development for half a year, starting in late 2023. The team at Olympus Interactive loves to find game ideas that haven’t been experimented with much. As such, the idea of Ninjas on Trampolines was formulated when discussing the concept of physics-based trampolines, and finding out that very few games capitalize on this idea. We also took inspiration from Splatoon and made the main objective of the game to “paint” other ninjas onto the background using a giant paintbrush (patent pending). 

Why ninjas? Well, we thought they would look cool bouncing everywhere. Why STICK FIGURE ninjas? Our development art included stick figures as characters and people really liked how they looked. Why are the ninjas painters? We wanted to deviate from traditional platform fighters and make the combat feel unique. To keep the game casual, we avoided button combos and felt paint would help to make quick deaths feel more impactful.

Existing Mechanics

Paint:

We currently have a shader applying a mask to the background texture so when a player gets painted it will apply a bunch of circles to the background giving the visual aspect of paint on the texture. There are two types of paint with splatters being one and a velocity based stroke which works under the condition that the player is moving at a high enough speed. This is only currently implemented on players getting painted and not with the crown.

Gamemodes:

We currently have two game modes in the project, a Free-for-all game mode (pretty self explanatory) and a Hold the crown game mode.  Hold the Crown features a crown that players can pick up and while they hold it atop their head will passively paint onto the background.  

If a player gets painted the crown will pop off their head allowing another player to pick the crown up.

Sound:

The sound design for our game is meant to feel arcadey. Using a more techno design for all of the music within the game and not having hyper realistic SFX. Along with this, we want everything to make a sound for the game. Current SFX are swing, jump, trampoline, getting painted, UI click, UI hover and a start match voice over. Music for the game currently exists in the main menu, player selection and in match. We plan to expand the amount of songs we have and give people the option to pick which one they want to have during the game. 

Art:

All the art in the game is currently development art. We do have a new character in the works, but not all of the animations are done for it yet so we can’t add it to the game just yet. In the coming weeks we will give you more updates. 

UI/UX:

As of right now we have placeholder UI, if you could even call it that. Its only purpose is to allow us to get from the main menu to a match and back to the main menu. Over the course of the coming weeks development on a more finalized version will begin to be developed. While it might take some time to get in the engine itself the drawings and wireframes will be shown off at times to give you all the ability to comment on them. Plans are for the UI to be completely customized to our game with animations, art and design all being done in house.

Multiplayer: 

A key aspect of our game is the ability to play with others. While it was a pain in our ass for a while, local multiplayer is now completely done. Players will join and leave at will without causing errors for others. Don’t worry about disconnects as well, if someone's controller d/c’s they will be auto backed out from the lobby. Players can pick from a multitude of different colors to paint with. Once players are ready to get into the action, they can click the ready button. Once everyone in the lobby is ready, they will then be prompted to press start to begin. A readied player can back out of being ready by pressing the back button. In the future the play is to allow for players to have a small training ground below the UI of selecting a character. This will allow for players to warm up, keep them entertained and get to learn the game without being in the actual match itself. Full detail on how this will work is not yet known but as we get around to building it we will release more details.

Recent Additions

Over the last month, the project experienced many backend improvements, including a long-needed overhaul of trampoline physics and various cleanups done to both file structure and architecture. For the first 4-5 months of development, trampoline physics relied heavily upon reacting at specific “springs” of the trampoline instead of creating a ripple effect throughout the entire object. This has now been changed as trampoline rigidbodies are connected to each other by hinges instead of being constrained and placed next to each other. Along with this, ninjas are able to get a slight boost to velocity when pressing the jump button on a trampoline to allow for greater velocities in a smaller amount of time. 

Technicals of the Old Trampolines:

The original physics of the trampoline were based off of physics code found here: Synert/TrampolinePhysics: Trampoline physics test in Unity (github.com). They consisted of multiple rigidbodies stacked next to one another constrained on the local X or Y axis, which we named “trampoline springs”. Each of these objects had a spring joint attached to them, which would react to players who bounced on them and sent them in the opposite direction. Why did we decide to change physics? Well, there were a few reasons:

1. The structure of the rigidbodies made it difficult for the trampoline’s physics to act in unison.
2.  Making diagonal trampolines was impossible due to constraining physics on the global X or Y axis
3. Because of global constraints, there was a lot of unnecessary logic to ensure the trampolines worked.
4. There are massive rigidbodies below the surface of the trampolines which cannot be ignored by the player’s collision. 

Technicals of the New Trampolines:

The new trampoline physics addressed the main four issues above. Instead of having multiple separate rigidbodies, all of the rigidbodies are connected via joints. This eliminates the large colliders below the trampolines and allows the physics to act in unison with one another. Along with this, physics constraints are no longer needed to keep the rigidbodies in place, meaning diagonal trampolines are now possible! 

Weekly Update

This past week, our priorities revolved around fixing bugs, reworking old code, adjusting folders and doing documentation (T-T). Lots of boring stuff, I know, but it was much needed.

Also....

• Granular synthesis for trampoline sounds was added back in and readjusted to new trampolines.
• You can no longer fall through trampolines by fast falling and jumping at the same time.
• Crown no longer get stuck on a player if 2 players paint each other at the same time.
• Crown physics improved/adjusted to work better with new trampolines.
• Removed the pixel shader from the game.
• Haptics for painting, getting painted and bouncing on trampolines.

In the coming weeks, we plan to begin to work on some actual UI/UX for the game, new game modes and reworking our paint splatters to look more like paint.

Until next time!

Olympus Interactive