PC Gamer - UK (2022-01)

I

f limitations breed creativity, thentoday’s

developershaveitharderthanever. Withfree

accesstothe world’s top gameengines – not to

mention the knowledge bankofanentire

industryavailable through Twitter, YouTube,

and Discord – there’s littleholding themback. When

two Toronto studentsnamed MareSheppardand

RaiganBurns set out tomakea platformerbackin

2001, however, theyhad nothing but limitations.

“We both had old computers that couldn’t run AAA

games,” Burns remembers. “But they could run freeware

games no problem.” For a couple of years he playedSoldat

• a twist onWorms built around jet boots. “If you jump and
  then thrust, you can fly upwards,” Burns says. “Because
  your jump momentum is added to the thrust momentum.”
  It turned out to be a simple piece of code to copy.
  Then, one day, a Bungie dev in a Usenet group called
  Game Dev Algorithms shared how object collision worked
  inHalo. “The thing is,” Burns says, “there wasn’t a lot of
  good information out on the internet back then.” And soN:
  The Way of the Ninja was born – a platformer about
  building momentum, and avoiding collisions.
  Metanet didn’t have Unreal Engine 4 or instant
  publishing through Steam – instead it had Adobe Flash,
  which could be used to make 2D games. “When we were
  using it, it only had vector rendering, which looked
  beautiful, but was really, really slow,” Burns says. “The
  speed was proportional to the number of pixels that
  changed every frame, so we knew from the beginning – no

scrolling. And everything should be as small as possible, so

that the number of pixels changing is low.”

Inspired in part by the Japanese freeware game

Puchiwara noBouken, the pair made the player’s ninja a

tiny stick figure, who navigated brutalist rooms made up of

grey, angular passageways. The maps involved mine-

strewn chicanes, homing rocket death strips and hundreds

of retries, but they never took up more than a single screen.

“Parkour was starting to be a thing,” Burns says. “Once we

had that additive momentum vertically, wall jumping

became very acrobatic, because you could gain speed.”

Metanet leaned into the difficulty, but was smart about

it. Sheppard and Burns used their independent status to

question the wisdom of inherited platforming traits like

Game Over screens. “There was definitely a sense that

certain concepts in game design were stuck in the past or

just sucked,” Burns says.

“A lot of times we were pushing back,” Sheppard adds.

“Why do they have to always be this way?” ThoughN was

tough, it wasn’t punishing – once you died, the screen

simply reset, and you tried again. Hit points and extra

lives were just two more things Metanet didn’t need to

work out how to program.

“The minimalism was definitely an explicit thing we

wanted to do, but it was because we knew we were just two

people and we were learning,” Burns says. “So we

simplified and got rid of all the window dressing.”

WhenN was released, the browser version ran badly

• not that players of the time cared. You didn’t turn your
  nose up at a free game back then. Not when it let you soar
  like Sonic starring in an off-Broadway production of
  Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

THE N’D

Since then, Metanet has only published new iterations of

N. “We’ve made a bunch of other stuff,” Burns says. “It’s

just, nothing is good enough. We don’t really want to

release a game unless we have as much fun playing it as we

have playing N, which is a pretty high bar for us to meet.”

EvenN+and N++, the critically acclaimed commercial

follow-ups to the free project, aren’t sequels as such. Burns

describes them as further excavations – attempts to pull a

perfect statue from the marble of that original idea.

“We were definitely aware that there was this latent

potential that we had accidentally hit upon withN,” he

says. “It wasn’t until we were makingN++ that we

realised that playing the game is about this perfectionism,

and that’s us. It’s like a fractal.”

JeremyPeel

TRY,TRY AGAIN

How N: THE WAY OF THE NINJA becamethe PC’s bestplatformer – then got better

KING BROWSER

These web platformers werenoFlash inthe pan

VVVVVV

From previous column guest

Terry Cavanagh, this

gravity-flipping adventure

paints with simplecolours

• both in its garish maps and
  emotive characters – to quite
  extraordinary effect.

CELESTE

Now known asCeleste

Classic, this journey up a

mountain with a girl who can

only jump and dash became

the basis for a superb

meditation on anxiety.

Sounds unlikely, I know.

MEATBOY

There aredozens of Flash

projects in Ed McMillen’s

back catalogue, many of

them disgustingly gory, but

only this one spawned the

defining precision platformer

of the ’00s.

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