Ninjoreo

Project Description

This is a 2d video game inspired by Doodle Jump. You jump on falling platforms and enemies for as long as you can. Over time, the game and music speed up and it becomes more difficult. There are also multiple themes that you can switch through with new art and music.

Development

This was my first video game project that I had designed by myself. I used a layout from the tutorial I followed during class at the League. I copied the three game state code and adapted it to my own game.

The character, Ninjoreo, is a ninjoreo that I came up with in elementary and middle school. He debuted in a platformer game in Scratch that I created. You can view that project and others here.

The game uses a Timer object to draw and update all of the game objects. In each frame, an KeyListener checks for the controls and changes the velocity of the player. When the player hits the top of a platform or enemy, it regains the ability to jump and is set to a small upward velocity. Colliding with the bottom of an enemy causes the player to launch downward.

One of the most difficult parts of this project was implementing the music. I composed, performed, and recorded my own music to be used in the game. However, I didn't know how to play music in Java, but I had help from my teachers. When ended up using JApplet, which unfortunately doesn't seem to work anymore. In order to make the music more dynamic, I set up code that could loop the in game music and change files in between loops so that I could increase the speed. This also allowed me to make a version of the music for when the player falls, which added a transition to the main menu music. This was my first time implementing music into a program in this way, and I hope to improve both my composition and recording skills.

A lot of the time and effort put into this game was used for additional artwork using GIMP and original music. I added 3 different skins to play with and each had its own theme and music. For the Totoro theme, I used music I found online and added two seperate items to knock out of the tree, which required many changes to my previous framework. The effort may not have been worth it, but the final product turned out nice.

In the end, I spent about 6 months working on this project for around 2 hours per week. It showed me that I had many skills that I could combine to create an amazing final product. For a year and a half of programming experience, it turned out pretty well.

Download

If you would like to try out the game for yourself, here is a download link. It is a jar file, and can be run on Java 11. The music can be found here.