Nostalgia: Cyber Ninja (mobile/J2ME)

Cyber Ninja was a platformer mobile game, developed in 2004. This was the first mobile game I’ve ever made!

It was a collaboration effort, involving a friend who that acted as producer and game designer. Originally, it was to be called Impalator and sport a medieval/fantasy theme, but this later changed to a high-tech/sci-fi theme. It was supposed to compete with mobile platformers of that time, namely Prince of Persia and Splinter Cell.

The game-play was a combination of pure platforming (jump, run, dodge enemies), puzzle (e.g. “hack” terminals to activate platforms) and combat. The combat phase was very similar to Blizzard’s Black Thorne (a “hide-from-projectiles” mechanic).

I developed the game in Java for J2ME, with Nokia 3510i as the master version. The technical restrictions were quite crazy, as 3510i had 96×65 pixels resolution, with 64kb of package and 210kb of RAM. Developing the engine and tools, as well as optimizing for this platform took about 3 months of working in the spare time. As far as I remember, I was using JBuilder for developing the engine and C++Builder for developing the game editor.

Fun fact, I was working 2 jobs at that time, and this one came as a third 🙂

Unfortunately, the game ended up with only one level due to the game designer losing interest in the project. As the attempts to find a buyer failed to materialize into something concrete, we decided to abandon the project.

I’ve ended up releasing the source code and tools (and modified graphics) as open-source/GPL, under the name of Lethal Metal. Sure, in this day when even web games have 10-20Mb and eat up hundred of MB of RAM, this game is rather out of place. However, you may find ideas on how to implement various platformer features (moving platforms, elevators, climbing, etc) in an efficient no-non-sense way.