10 Second Ninja – ultra fast, highly demanding single-screen platforming chaos
I am terrible at 10 Second Ninja. Like, I am so bad I think I may actually be angering its designer Dan Pearce. He's showing his precision-based 2D platformer in GameCity's open arcade space and can't quite believe his eyes as I fail a seemingly simple double jump time after time, impaling my teeny ninja on a row of spikes. "You do this for a living?" he asks.
Developed as a side-project from his work with brilliant indie team The Tall Trees, 10 Second Ninja is about saving Earth from invading Nazi robots and their leader – a huge spherical metallic ball resembling Hitler. It is not a serious game – at least not in terms of narrative, which is something of an escape for Pearce. "The games we do at Tall Trees are very emotionally driven," he explains. "That can get exhausting after a while. I really made this to teach myself more about game design."
The premise is simple: you race through 40 single-screen levels, destroying all the robots on each, either with your sword, or with your long-range shuriken attack, which can only be employed three times on each level. The catch is, you only have – yes – 10 seconds to complete each screen: the faster you do it, the more stars you are rewarded.
The movement is super smooth, the double jump mechanic perfect, but the levels are incredibly exact and fiendishly challenging, especially later, when dissolving platforms and falling metal cubes come in. It's like a sadistic take on the original Super Mario titles, a new slant on the whole 'massacore' genre of unfairly tough platformers.
But Pearce wasn't really inspired by the Miyamoto classics, or the vintage titles like Bombjack and Bruce Lee that it recalls. He's 19-years-old. 19! To get here, he studied the work of new wave 2D exponents like Adam Saltsman and Vlambeer. Both are perfectionists, both obsessively iterate on controls, pace and 'game feel' with relentless dedication. "I grew up with 3D games so I've had to work backwards," says Pearce. "Saltsman has written on how, it's not about what the player is doing with their thumbs, it's about what they're thinking in the seconds before that. If you look at where Adam placed the hit box for the character in Canabalt, it's behind where you would expect – he works with the instincts of the player."
Pearce describes the experience of perfecting a level in 10 Second Ninja as like dancing. For me, you have to stop thinking about the level as a space, and see it as visual set of instructions for a Street Fighter special move: you concentrate on the exact joypad inputs needed to pull it off. It is demanding but compulsive – failure comes in seconds and a fast retry button gets you in again straightaway. You just keep going.
Except, I'm so bad that eventually I just meekly hand the controls back to Pearce and he races through the game, amiably chatting about his influences and approach to design. So far he has been working on this game for 18 months, far longer than he expected – but the effort and application show in the pinpoint controls. From Vlambeer, Pearce has clearly learned the value of iteration, but he also brings in his own charm and wit. Which is a pretty likeable combination. The future of ridiculously compulsive single-screen 2D platformers is in safe hands.
• 10 Second Ninja is due for release on PC and Mac in early 2014
Source: Theguardian. com
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