Well, I survived the 2018 Northern Game Design Challenge (NGDC)!
As I mentioned, my team decided we were building a platformer. We were hoping we’d get something like “cyborg ninja” (which was one of the six possible themes we were able to work with), but the NGDC community voted on “the stock market” for us. So we made a platformer based on the stock market.
One of my team members made the quip that our main character was a “trader by day, ninja by night.” And so Hostile Takeover was born!
In Hostile Takeover, you play the ninja Martin Ryker who lost all his money and has been working as a stock trader. He gets the chance to get even with Claudius Capital, the company that bankrupt him, when he hears they are being audited tomorrow for suspected insider trading. Martin Ryker decides to sneak into Claudius Capital to plant evidence of insider trading, insuring the company will go down!
I was responsible for creating the character backstories for the game. I also wrote the dialogue/cinematic stuff at the beginning of the game, designed the levels (I designed four in total), and found a lot of the sound effects used in the game. Oh, and I created the Twitter account @ClaudiusCapital for the game’s villain, Michael Claudius the 3rd. Claudius’ tweets were used to justify some of the things in what became our game’s demo (we managed to get only the first level working, and a lot of the mechanics/graphics are missing).
Here’s the video we created for the end of the NGDC. Shaun, one of my team, put it together including the trailer. I’m the one who played through the game for the demo part at the end of the video.
If you want to play through the game, head to hostiletakeover.ninja. Everything we made so far is there, including links to the video and Claudius’ Twitter account. The rest of the team wants to finish the game, so I’ll post more updates as progress continues. 🙂
An Acquaintance with Letters 