Ninja Jump was the final project that my group made during my first Computer Science class at UH Manoa. For the final project, our goal was to develop a game based on another real game, and my team chose Doodle Jump as our model. The aim of the game is to continuously jump upwards onto the next platform without falling off, and the game ends when player inevitably fails. All three of us worked on various parts of the program, so clear boundaries are hard to draw, but I did most of the work on the scrolling and level design aspect.
As Ninja Jump was my first group project in a university settings, it was an invaluable learning experience in teamwork and juggling responsibilities. Some challenges that arose during the creation was needing to start over after some initial difficulties with our first prototype, solving conflicting visions on scope and goals of the project, and presenting a project in front of an audience of almost 200 people - an experience I still find nerve-wracking to this day, but nonetheless it was a good preview of what presenting software in the future is like.
Perhaps the greatest lesson I learned from this though, is the importance of consistency when demonstrating. Ninja Jump’s platform placing relies on random numbers, and while we were able to successfully practice, on the actual stage, all 3 of us unfortunately died quite early due to platforms that were unreachable, which didn’t make for a very good impression. It’s not a very good look when the creators of a game can’t survive longer than 15 seconds in it.
The code for Ninja Jump is available here.