Mark of the Ninja: Best. Game. Ever.
Mark of the Ninja was recently released on Xbox Live Arcade for the Xbox360, and even more recently for Windows on Steam. I was one of the programmers on Ninja, my first project at Klei Entertainment.
I’d just like to take the time to point out that from Oct 24-25, 2012, Mark of the Ninja was the highest rated PC game… ever.
Metacritic’s PC game releases sorted by score, circa Oct 25, 2012.
Mark of the Ninja ranked #1 at a humble 97/100, beating out such gaming giants as Half-Life 2 and Out of the Park Baseball 2007.
Ok, so maybe our ranking position won’t last forever [actually, it lasted until about half way through writing this post, it was a good day at the top]… but I’m still very proud of the game we made, and had an entirely enjoyable time making it. Not to mention how pleasantly surprised I’ve been at the overwhelming praise for the game and positive reviews and comments from players. Of course we all thought it was going to be a good game, but when you’re the one making it, it’s hard to tell how it’s going to fly with the gaming public.
More To Come
I hope to write at least one or two proper posts talking about some of the technical stuff I did on Ninja in more detail. I’ve already had an article submission accepted for a successor to the AI Game Programming Wisdom series to be called Collected Wisdom of Game AI Professionals with the same editor as the original, Steve Rabin. You can read more about this project on the AI Wisdom website.
In particular I hope to write a little bit about how we generated the dynamic lights in the game; and how we used a sound mesh to calculate both filtering for audio sound effects played for the user, as well as what in-game “noise” events the NPCs could “hear”.