The Prophecy of Kendo: Prologue
The Prophecy of Kendo: Prologue is an RPG game made in Macromedia Flash that I released back in 09 April 2006. You play as a ninja named Kendo who makes his way through a building filled with enemies in order to escape from an oppressive government.
You can play it on Newgrounds.
Concept
Kendo was heavily inspired by Sinjid: Battle Arena (2003) and Sinjid: Shadow of the Warrior (2004), both being the same genre and platform. The idea came when I saw some fanart by Moriarti and eventually we made a game around it. He made the original concept art and I built a game around it.
The idea was to make a teaser pilot for what would eventually become a larger series. Though we were initially happy with what we ended up making, the whole engine was revamped after Prologue’s release.
Story
The story was written by Moriarti and very little of it is really represented in the game itself, but I’m including it here for the sake of completion.
Kendo, The swordsman.
Once again, religion had caused war. The high lords’ beliefs and greed brought nothing but hatred and killing. There was once a time when this country was one, where all of the inhabitants followed the same rules and nobody sought war. When everyone was friends with one another, everyone helped each other, and a single emperor reigned in peace…
This time is now over. People have now learned how to forge weapons yet again, and blood is spilled every day. The two sides of the war had once been a single country, its name being Unitopia. This country spread from the coldest regions to the south, to the hot, sunny beaches on the main continents. It spread all over the planet, from east to west, north to south. People loved the fact that the world could be ruled under one hegemony, no marked territories, nothing to fight over.
But all of this ended one sad, dark day. The priest Undibre had been having dreams, dreams that had been tampering with his beliefs. In these dreams God talked to him; saying that his beliefs were wrong, that his very way of life was wrong. Undibre believed that the only correct way to live life was to have all white men become masters, and enslave all colored men and women. In his way of thought, white men and women had been created by God, while all colored people were cultivated by the Devil.
Racism has surged again when Undibre’s ideas had poisoned the minds of many men and women had gone to his hearings…
Soon Undibre’s ideas had spread halfway around the world by the time the emperor had been informed. Undibre’s new ‘religion’ had become known as Puritism. It gave Undibre power, enough to challenge the Emperor himself. So the Puritans divided their part of the country from the Emperor’s side, thus creating the two countries in the world today; Puritopia and Rebelia. War has waged ever since, and neither side has succumbed to the other…
Puritopia now has planned the ruin of Rebelia; the Puritan mages have magically enhanced infants to make them stronger, faster, natural born leaders. These warrior-children have been trained all their life; they’ve mastered sword techniques and have passed through ninja training. They are all very qualified generals and have a few magical capabilities. Years of war have raged on, and now the children are young adolescents. This is where the story of Kendo begins….
Kendo is one of these ‘super warriors’, ready for any kind of challenge thrown at him. There is one problem though, he does not think that Puritan beliefs are correct, and wishes to join the emperor. Now he must fight his way through Puritopia, fighting most of his beloved childhood friends. Here is where your journey begins….
Opening
The game starts out with a preloader screen. These were very typical in flash games back in the day since even a file that’s a few MBs would take a minute or two to load. It’s a little animation of Kendo doing some ninja acrobatics.
There is then an animation that presents the story. I had to exclude this from the video since it includes copyrighted music (Cool Joke’s “UNDO” and “Bratja” from Fullmetal Alchemist’s opening), but here are some screenshots.
Next we’re greeted with a menu/settings screen that allows you to change the graphics quality (filtering mode) or load a game if you saved one previously.
Gameplay
We finally got to the game itself. It takes place on a floor with several rooms. To the left of the starting room is a save point. To the right, there’s an enemy: a guard.
This is where we enter battle mode. These aren’t random encounters, they’re all scripted. At the start of the game, you have access to a regular attack, a jump attack (slightly stronger but costs stamina) and objects. The objects are limited, so it’s best to keep them for the strongest enemies.
After you defeat the enemy, the right side area is unlocked where an old man tells you what to do, as well as the upper area through the door. The upper area has one more guard enemy and the mage boss.
The mage boss is the most difficult enemy in the game, so it’s important to save your items for this battle. After that, you get a cutscene where he is killed, with what is supposed to be a matrix-like camera move.
This battle gives you the fireball attack, which lets you dispatch the final enemy with ease. After that, you can make your way out the window to finish the stage.
Things that I messed up
This is the first large project that I made following the earlier Flash projects that I worked on. While discussing the specifics of the project, I did have a good idea of what I wanted to make, but lacked the experience that only mistakes can bring to one’s abilities.
The biggest issue by far is how the game handles frames. Instead of using some kind of onEnterFrame(){} functionality, each scene is essentially two keyframes: One that handles all the frame logic and another right after it that just sends it back one frame. This makes it that every scene is also essentially copy-pasted so changing something like the position of the floor or the menu into something local to each scene rather than a global entity.
The hit detection is also fairly wonky. Basically if you walk onto a forbidden tile, it forces you back the other way in the next frame. It also means that you can’t interact with the save point unless you’re literally pressing the button to walk towards it.
Speaking of save points, it’s kind of useless. This is a sub-5 minute game so it’s pretty pointless. I suppose I just wanted to prove that it could be done when thinking of a much longer sequel using the same engine.
There are some things that graphically look very weird. I’ll just list them out:
- Skewed torches
- Mix of gradient and flat colours
- Strange perspective for the floorboards
- Mix of boring fonts and unreadable fancy fonts
- Weird interpolation in the mage death scene
The audio department is very lacking. The music that I composed for the settings screen is extremely grating, and the only sound in the main game is the character’s footsteps. Playtesters thought that there was something wring with their speakers when trying the game out.
The only good music in the game is the Fullmetal Alchemist soundtrack in the intro, but those are copyrighted (it was a different time back then).
The game’s flow is also pretty bad. Every enemy except the first one causes a level-up to occur, which completely recovers your health and stamina. This was mostly because the boss gives something like 190% of a level’s required experience which pretty much guarantees a level-up.
The guards are also programmed differently in the sense that they have different health points and strength so even if you calculated the first one, you couldn’t use that to your advantage.
Conclusion
The Prophecy of Kendo: Prologue is a learning experience. It’s very flawed in every department, but I haven’t encountered any glitches ever since I released it. Well, there is some trouble with text wrapping like in the fight menu’s “Objects”, but that wasn’t there when run in Flash Player instead of Ruffle.
My other projects that I made after this definitely improved on what I learned from this, particularly hit detection and modularisation of assets.
While not perfect, I’m glad that it managed to get released. There’s a whole bunch of other things that i worked on that never got to see the light of day so I like the fact that I managed to release a game that at least works as it should.
