Ok, as I promised last week here we go to the final part of "Birth of Oniken"... Nice name, it could be a comic book...After the death of "Onikenchou" I felt very frustrated about making games, drawing comic book characters or even pixel artworks. So I gave up everything and dedicated myself to my architecture studies. From 2006 until 2009 I did nothing besides architecture stuff. When I concluded Architecture college in 2010, Pedro came and showed me a mockup he made with Ryu Hayabusa NES sprite in a 8-bit like Onikenchou background and sayed "Hey man, looks cool doesn't!? Let's go and remake Onikenchou in 8 bit style!" And I sayed "No, Onikenchou is dead, I don't want to do anything about games anymore." And he was like " ok ok D: "During a holiday in february 2010 I was playing some of my NES games like crazy. Them I put my Ninja Gaiden trilogy games out of the dust and started to play all of them again.
I finished Ninja Gaiden 1, then Ninja Gaiden 2 and Finally Ninja Gaiden 3 on the same day. I finished the three games, I turned off my NES and I was like "Holy crap those games are awesome!!!" I was also thinking in how I've spent hours playing those games again, just like when I was a kid. Back then I used to play those old NES games without getting tired or bored. Today's games are so complex that sometimes they can make you bored instead of giving you some fun.With all that in my mind, I started to wonder "man those NES action games are so simple and very addicting, maybe it was here where I made a terrible mistake, Onikenchou was so full of stuff that it wasn't fun, maybe I could make a simpler game like those NES action games.
"I turned on my computer and did some sketches, it was weird to open graphics gale again after 3 years. After some time trying I finally created a decent looking NES style Zaku sprite. I've sent it to my friend Paulo (the guy from Proto Thunder) and he helped me out with some colors.After that, I did the whole Zaku animation cycles and started a custom platform engine in Multimedia Fusion 2. Soon after I was sending a small demo stage to Pedro and sayed "Hey man. You were right about that, let's make an 8-bit Onikenchou, but this time we're gonna call it Oniken! Simple and cool! After that we started working on Oniken.I have learned a lot from my past mistakes, and they put me in the right direction. I hope that this experience I have shared with you guys can help you not to repeat the same mistakes I did. Remember, old games can teach us lot more than anyone, play them and play hard! They are an unlimited source of knowledge about in-game design. Lots of game designers love to say that old games were full of problems and had wrong game design. I don't think so. I don't consider myself a game designer but a very experienced gamer and I like to think that games evolved a lot and improved a lot too in some aspects, however I also think that we lost lots of good aspects of the old games and one of them is their simplicity.
That´s all that I have to say, thanks to everyone and sorry for my english.
