With how central this project has been to our life and identity for years, it’s hard to believe its been almost a year and a half since our last post. There are reasons - good reasons, not just excuses - the author of this site has been focusing on new journeys in his career and family.

Working full time, getting married, and fatherhood have become the priorities for me, but Falling Ninja is something that is always in the back of my brain and I don’t want it to languish.

Here are some announcements on our latest work:

New deadness board app

We will be releasing a new version of our Deadness Board app, called Croquet Deadness Board Advanced. This app is developed on a more modern, native codebase that will make it easier to maintain into the future. It also includes highly requested features like a companion Watch app (that’s right - the deadness board can now live on your Apple Watch!) and multi-player sharing so the board can be shared live with other players, spectators, and referees.

There are other improvements under the hood too, but we’ll go into more detail in the official announcement. At this time, we are planning to release it as a new app rather than updating the existing one. While we are weighing whether doing an update will help with word of mouth by getting it directly to existing users, we want to preserve the previous purchase for those who might favor the old app. It is a pet peeve of ours when apps are updated and a beloved old version is lost forever, so we are not trying to do the same.

Croquet Pro III

This one has been cooking on the backburner for a long time. We have been waffling for awhile on whether to make the project in Unity (C# is more familiar to us that Unreal’s C++), Unreal Engine, expand the Croquet Pro II codebase from GameMaker or try a new the promising open source engine Godot. In the end, we are moving forward with the Unity app and this is in the early stages of development.

We plan to address some of the main feedback we received about Croquet Pro and Croquet Pro II: the lack of shot variety and the difficulty. We also are refreshing the camera and controls, making them more intuitive and robust. Finally, we are laying a foundation for multiplayer and cross-platform play - possibly even a wider console release in the future.

Ruler of the Waves 1916

We’ll admit it - the scope creep got a bit out of hand on this one. We have detailed the journey here in many of our previous blog posts. We set up a bug tracker, but after a year or so of inactivity JIRA deleted it - but this may be a blessing in disguise. This game is supposed to be our opus, hence the want to expand and make it detailed and excellent, but at a certain point we were so focused on expansion that we failed to further the core gameplay. When we return to development, and we hope this is soon, we will be looking to update the playable demo in Steam early access. We are likely also to cut out some of the planned features to focus on delivery.

Futhermore, we have decided to republish the mobile version of Ruler of the Waves 1916 on the app store. Even though the game isn’t perfect and arguably unfinished (as a reviewer noted, it doesn’t have any danger in the form of attacking enemies), we are proud of what we made and think its worthwhile to keep it published.

We thank all everyone who has downloaded our apps or reached out to us with their interest or feedback. It is a huge motivation for us and part of why we are encouraged to keep our projects going.

Until next time…