| 
  • If you are citizen of an European Union member nation, you may not use this service unless you are at least 16 years old.

  • You already know Dokkio is an AI-powered assistant to organize & manage your digital files & messages. Very soon, Dokkio will support Outlook as well as One Drive. Check it out today!

View
 

Development History

Page history last edited by Eric Blade 11 years, 2 months ago
  • The Beginning
  • Beta
  • Beagle Enters
  • Live
  • The Present
  • The Future

 

The Beginning

 

In the beginning, there was NinjaLord, a.k.a., John K. Facey, III. NinjaLord enjoyed programming as a hobby and trade. He was a contract programmer while going through technical school. He developed NinjaWars from scratch as a fun little project. When he had something remotely usable, it was on the web and a small circle of friends began using it. Eventually, as he added more features, more players came by, through word of mouth and through Google. He founded Cosmic Soldier Studios as a way to advertise his skills and published the game under the studio. The game was slow, but usable because there were only a few hundred players.

 

Beta

 

During Beta, the player Magatsu offered small icons for the shop, which added a bit more color and flavor to the game. There were still many bugs, many display issues, and communication problems, but the game flourished with a small dedicated community. Meanwhile, NinjaLord was active on the net. Through chatrooms and forums he met others interested in games, and made some connections, which lead to the introduction of Beagle.

 

Beagle Enters

 

Beagle was getting into games around the same time NinjaLord was moving NinjaWars into Beta. Through networking on forums and chatrooms, Beagle ran into a few people who wanted to start projects. All of them fell through. However, he met someone who knew NinjaLord and got the two in touch. Beagle requested developer status and received it. After a few days of cleaning up basic code, Beagle began reworking the interface for the game. It didn't display properly in all browsers and there were tons of problems from standard compliance to flat out broken displays. After a few weeks of migrating to CSS and standard compliant XHTML, NinjaWars was looking a lot better. The players quickly accepted Beagle as he was on the forums and in the chat regularly making sure everyone got what they wanted. Many changes were implemented at the request of players. The drop down menus used to search for opponents was changed to the current player list we have now, complete with rankings, search, and pagination. Once the player base got over a few hundred, the drop down menus took almost a full minute to load all the player names!

 

Live

 

Throughout Beta, NinjaLord passed more and more work to Beagle as school and work began to get the best of him. Beagle ultimately took over the role of admin and caretaker while NinjaLord retained his figurehead status. The mail system was modified, cheats were removed one by one as they were discovered and exploited. New clan code was implemented. Eventually, the weight of the old system became too heavy and Beagle officially closed Beta and moved the project to live status. This basically marked the end of active development on the game and left only minor maintenance and supervision. The game grew in player base slowly but surely and brings us into the present.

 

The Present

 

Presently, the NinjaWars team consists of 5 dedicated people. Many have come and gone, these 5 have stayed. NinjaWars 2 has been promised for a long time, and nothing has been seen yet. The developers all have had many bumps in the road, from academic, to financial, to personal, to medical. The game has been completely taken over by the team. NinjaLord has given the rights to the game to Beagle directly. The game has shifted hosts twice due to money problems and favors running out. The current host is slightly unstable, but the game is strong.

 

The Future

 

In the near future, the team intends to form a company with NinjaWars 2 as its flagship. The game will be released on a new, robust host and sport an entire new set of features, but keeping true to the original tenets of NinjaWars: community, competition, and simplicity. After release of NinjaWars 2, the team will divide its time between live maintenance and the development of their next title.

 

Comments (0)

You don't have permission to comment on this page.