Memorial Memories

In the spirit of Memorial Day, I thought I'd go down memory lane; looking back at the development of CYBERDRIVE NINJA 忍者.

 

Here we go!

 

Assassin's Fury

The very first iteration of CyberDrive Ninja. A very simple action battle system (ABS) was used at the time; when ABS were a big thing in RMVX. It was a very simple and modest game. Even the story wasn't as complex as it is now. Dennis (based on Dark Den from this site), the main character, had recently lost his father. Upon this discovery, the main character is approached my a peculiar man who offers him membership into a secret assassin group called Crescent. It is then revealed that his father was part of said mysterious group.

 

If this sounds a lot like Wanted and Assassin's Creed II, Omar felt the same way. And he made fun of me. A lot.
So the story of the game changed from there into…

 

Black Silhouette

After being ridiculed by Omar, I decided to change the direction of the story and characters. I was stumped on ideas until I ran across an old game I used to follow on Game Maker called Black Silhouette. I had an epiphany! I googled the game, found the creator's DeviantArt page, tracked the page to his website, and found his contact information (I minored in stalking in school). Found you, Tony! I asked him if I could make a game based on his characters. Tony agreed, as long as I didn't make my story canon to his.

 

At this point, a lot of the things in the game changed. The artwork, battle system, maps, scripts, music, you name it! The game was becoming to look like it had some real depth. The story was rewritten to align with the lore of Tony's Black Silhouette and the characters were also modeled after Tony's characters.

 

And that's how Black Silhouette, the RMVX game, was born. But this birth was relatively short-lived.

 

Now comes…

 

CYBERDRIVE NINJA 忍者

As development continued, one thing kept bothering me. I didn't want the project to live in another game's shadow. I wanted the game to be able to stand on it's own; as a separate entity. Not as an addon. That's when the second epiphany hit me like a speeding truck! I'd just rename the game, but keep the characters and the story intact.

 

We've made a lot of strides since that day. The game has now become so well known that it appears on Google all over!