MARTIN PONICHTERA
Nakomo
Two centuries have passed since the fall of Nakomo. In the tales of the realm, he was a summoner of demons and an enemy of all life. The greatest of the heroes who wrought his doom became the first of the Iron Warlords, shogun of the realm. The years since have continued as they always have: in peace, in reverence of the kami, and in harmony with nature. But today, the winds bring change….
Team
1 Project Manager, 5 Programmers, 2 Artists, 1 Audio Engineer
Time Frame
June 2013 - Present (Unreleased)
Role
Programmer
Development Bio
Nakomo is an original IP created during the Owairakasoft: Winter of Code 2013. The team is mainly comprised of the programmers, whom were on their three month break in between study for their Bachelor's at Media Design School (myself included). Our project manager came along and offered us the opportunity to create something that would give us valuable experience as developers outside of university and possibly the opportunity to make some profit. We came together and created an idea for a game and recruited two very talented 2D artists and an audio engineer to join us on our journey.
As a programmer on the team I was responsible for much of the technical design and system architecture for the game in collaboration with the project manager and another programmer. We knew that we wanted to make something for iOS and Android, but were not sure on what framework to develop it on. We came to the decision that Marmalade SDK would be the perfect option considering its fully cross-platform for mobile and is written with C++ - the language that we were all most proficient at. The challenge came however that we had to create our own game framework to allow for menu navigation, sprite animation, data retrieval, and a whole bunch of gameplay elements - this is where a lot of my contribution came in.
We developed a prototype version of the game over the three months, and came out with a pretty solid playable demo. What was really exciting for us was that we were given the opportunity to present our game demo live at Digital Nationz as part of Telcom’s Home Grown in Auckland 2013.
We had planned to finish the game to release state that would hit the market in early 2014, but unfortunately the programming team had returned to university to finish their degree and were unable to work on the game. Since we have graduated Media Design School now, we are back in action and are coming back together to finish the game which will hopefully be released for all to play soon :)
Here is the trailer we showcased at Digital Nationz, 2013.
Press
Rip It Up: http://www.ripitup.co.nz/gaming/nakomo-developed-in-auckland-to-showcase-at-digital-nationz/
NZGamer: http://nzgamer.com/news/6839/nakomo-developed-in-auckland-to-showcase-at-digital-nationz.html
My Overview of Technical Implementations
XML data-driven node based menu and screen navigation system - responsible for connecting all of the game together from menus, to battles, to story quest screens.
Sprite sheet animation with pixel precise touch capability, atlasing and mobile texture compression (PVRTC and ETC).
Turn-based battle game-play mechanics which allowed for various attack types and actions - Stun, Damage over Time, Heal, Heal over Time, Life Steal, Cleave, Run away.
Character menu driven by physics springs to give the best feel for usability and natural looking animations.
 Title ScreenEach screen within the game is classified as a "node". Different types of nodes behave differently. For example, this is the title screen which is a menu node. Other nodes include battle, story, map, town, shop... and many others. |
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 Battle - Yakuza vs. BakemonoThere are many other types of node which contain many different behaviours. This is the battle node, which is arguably the main portion of the game. |
 Battle - Sohei vs. Kappa 1There are many other types of node which contain many different behaviours. This is the battle node, which is arguably the main portion of the game. Battle nodes could be composed with different environments, monsters and rewards. |
 Battle - Sohei vs. Kappa 2Animations within the game are sprite sheet based. Touch detection for pixel precision was implemented and worked for any sprite for the given frame of animation. |
 Character Menu - StatsThe character menu in the game is implemented to allow for quick transition from any given node without load time penalties of loading/unloading assets. This was done by capturing the last frame of the previous node and underlying it between transitions. |
 Character Menu - InventoryIt features all of the character's stats, inventory, quest log, shop and settings. The menu itself features physics springs for scrolling through information and expanding items for more information. |
Digital Nationz
We presented Nakomo at Digital Nationz as part of Telcom’s Home Grown in Auckland 2013. It was heaps of fun, we got to see people testing our game and get valuable insight into what people liked about it!
 Our little spot in Digital Nationz. |  Manning the booth! |
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 Our catalogue of creatures! |  People giving it a go! |
 More people giving it a go! |