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.  :(

In the Beginning

Most people thought that Paper Ninja got the idea from Fruit Ninja but that was wrong. To be fair, I need to give credit to actual game that inspires me: Zoo Lasso. Here's the story.....

On December 2009, I brought an iPod Touch for my son 4 years old birthday. He was very happy when he received the present. My wife give him an account so that he can download free games and if he want to buy any paid games, he will need to ask for permission.

Somewhere in February, when I was playing with my son's iPod Touch, I came across this game called Zoo Lasso. I thought it looks interesting, opened it up and played for a short while. I was amazed how responsive the iPod Touch is able to follow the finger movement. The smoothness of the touch leave a deep impact on my mind and a few days later while driving, I got the idea of a slashing game might be really fun.

That day after I reach home, I searched the App Store to see if there is any slashing games and to my surprise, there was none (I not sure I searched thorough enough, correct me if I am wrong)! So, this got me thinking about it for a few days and I think it will be interesting to build a slashing game. I thought of all sort of crazy ideas and I am confident that this unique way of gameplay will be a hit.

To keep it short, on March, I quit my full time job as a Senior Consultant in a respectable company to fully concentrate on developing this game.

Introduction

Paper Ninja is done by two person, an artist and a coder (that's me). I decided to write a blog about the background stories when I was developing Paper Ninja which is the first iPhone game that I had made. I hope to share the experience with fellow fans and independent developers, and also to document the process (so that next time I can show my son). However, I am not really good at writing and so please bare with me :D