SumiKen's development is almost at the end, and the release date is coming soon. I wanted to post my development diary here, as a thanks to every members here who is so supportive and helped making my dream come true. Thank you everyone! Development diary ----------------------------- SumiKen project started on August 2016 by me, OPNeon, a solo indie game developer from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The game is mostly influenced by PS2 game called Okami and Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai. I had an idea to make a simple game that would involve samurai and sword slashing action. And being my first game, I decided to make the game's scope really small so it's possible to actually finish making it. I went on to prototype the game for about 2 months on and off after work, before setting it aside to take some time off from it. During October 2016, my motivation died off and I did not see the potential in the game and wanted to call it quit. It's such a slow paced game and not very exciting at all. Unfortunately, the development came to a complete standstill. On December 2016, out of the blue, I decided to show SumiKen to my colleagues, just to see what they think of it. Not surprisingly, they didn't seems to be interested in it at all, it's just a slow game with some placeholder artworks, who would actually like it? Being on the positive side though, my colleagues did gave me different ideas on how to improve it. One particular clip my colleague showed me was the running scene from Studio Ghibli's Princess Kaguya. Instantly, it clicked. The motivation fired up and I decided to give the prototype one more chance. This time, the goal is to make the game fast paced, with the feeling of speed as shown in the clip. Fast forward to the the end of January 2017, the new prototype was completed. The game was so much better compared to the earlier prototype, it's fast paced and I felt great playing it. I decided to post it on a game forum to get feedbacks for the game, and I found Touch Arcade! The members here at Touch Arcade are very helpful, constantly giving feedbacks and even helped beta tested SumiKen. I am very grateful and truly appreciate all of your support, it's an awesome community here. For the next 3 months, I've spent countless hours developing SumiKen, single handedly coding, drawing, animating and marketing the game. It's a very intense development as I could only work on it part time during the night due to my daytime job as a technical artist in a local game studio. Most days, I worked from night till morning, 9pm till 3am, slowly developing SumiKen. It's a very difficult time, most days I felt sleep deprived and tired. But I had no thoughts on giving up at all, my only focus was to finish the game! In the end, sheer willpower and passion made me finish SumiKen. It will finally hit the App Store on 11 May 2017! I am very grateful for everyone who supported the game and helped me finished it, especially my family and girlfriend who gave me so much support and love during the difficult times. And now, I can finally sleep properly, for a while maybe. "Yay! I can finally call myself an indie game developer!" -OPNeon
I believe in making timeless games that people will play and remember. This game is made from my memories of playing Okami and Onimusha. Please enjoy the trailer for SumiKen, which will be released in a week on iOS App Store for $1.99! I will be posting some promo codes on TouchArcade this weekend. I hope you guys are as excited as I am! Subscribe to the TouchArcade YouTube channel Beautiful samurai iOS game drawn in Japanese sumi-e style Game Website: Website Twitter Facebook
Hey guys, here's some free promo codes for SumiKen! PWJAJXXH49ME EMP37XHPKE3T AME9ATWEJELW TFX76343H3RJ K39AP6FYKJNR Meanwhile, if would be great if anyone could help getting the words out for it by supporting the campaign here: https://www.thunderclap.it/projects/56550-sumiken Thanks!
Omg! This is too perfect I was watching the anime Rurouni Kenshin by complete coincidence when I downloaded this. So far my first imp, this is an endless slasher that makes me want to keep on playing.
got EMP37XHPKE3T, will leave impressions on the game thread and i am sure its gonna be awesome! very inspiring Devlog too. ps, i just started to dabble with Unity yesterday. with no prior knowlege of programming or game design, how long do you think i would need to make a game like SumiKen? part time after work, like you a year?
it's beautiful and very smooth! just one thing - can we have taps instead of swipes as a control option? i know you did the swipes to emulate the slashing, but all the best autorunners have taps for the simple reason a tap is far more instant and precise than a swipe. Especially on enemies one right after the other, it becomes very problematic for me at least. I propose that Tap on the left of the screen for example would be attack horizontal, and tap on the right part would be jumping slash-second tap while in the air downward slash and there you have it. Is it too much to add? EDIT : also, when you lose, the Tap to play again should restart you instantly, not show scores and more tapping needed - we need to restart as fast as possible!
Alright, I hear you guys I will include it in the next update, tap control and instant restart option. Thanks!
Yeah, you most likely can do it if you keep learning and doing it, persistence is key, finishing is really the difficult part. Most importantly , just make games you are passionate about and love what you do
For a while maybe haha, then I gonna continue game development and make some prototypes. This is just the first one so I'm pretty sure there are many room for improvement, will do better in future games!
