Conceptualization

The first thing that I do after I quit my job was to build a proof of concept. I quickly built a slashing prototype with trailing effect just to make sure that it was really as responsive as I thought. And it was good and I was confident that it works.

Next was the game concept. Before I quit my job, there were already a few ideas (trees, leaves, human, aliens etc) and paper was just one of it. One day, when I was drinking my coffee, staring at my desk and the waste paper basket (from ikea), I got this idea that it will be cool if I can build a story regarding some alien that make the wasted paper come alive, bounce on the desk and open up to attack the poor developer. So quickly, I crumple a piece of paper into a ball and take photo with green background. And here you go, this is the original photo of what I take and this is version 0.01 of the Paper Ninja!

After that, I thought to myself that if it is plainly just slashing pieces of paper, it will not be as fun. Hence, to make it more challenging, I added shields and swords to block the edges of the paper. But that was still not enough, to differentiate the masters and novice, I make it such that those who can kill many papers quickly will be rewarded with Combo score.

Armed with all these game concept, I tried to draw the sprites. During that time, I notice that a lot of App Store games got really novice looking graphics and still made it to the top. Hence, I thought that why not just draw some characters and scan it. This was a big mistake, I ended up spending weeks trying to draw something decent. This is one of the result:

Yeah I am bad at drawing... I know. I started to get worried as I wonder will I ever get it right? And, I keep reminding myself that there is still sound and music to come.  :(