TRY, TRY AGAIN

How N: THE WAY OF THE NINJA became the PC’s best platformer – then got better

- Jeremy Peel

If limitations breed creativity, then today’s developers have it harder than ever. With free access to the world’s top game engines – not to mention the knowledge bank of an entire industry available through Twitter, YouTube, and Discord – there’s little holding them back. When two Toronto students named Mare Sheppard and Raigan Burns set out to make a platformer back in 2001, however, they had nothing but limitations.

“We both had old computers that couldn’t run AAA games,” Burns remembers. “But they could run freeware games no problem.” For a couple of years he played Soldat – a twist on Worms built around jet boots. “If you jump and then thrust, you can fly upwards,” Burns says. “Because your jump momentum is added to the thrust momentum.” It turned out to be a simple piece of code to copy.

Then, one day, a Bungie dev in a Usenet group called Game Dev Algorithms shared how object collision worked in Halo. “The thing is,” Burns says, “there wasn’t a lot of good information out on the internet back then.” And so N: The Way of the Ninja was born – a platformer about building momentum, and avoiding collisions.