Ueda

Dear Ninja, It is my pleasure to announce that we are finally moving into closed alpha stage starting tomorrow (14 Oct) at 5:00pm PST (Pacific Standard Time). Final Alpha? What does this mean? Because we are soon to reach a point in development where we are confident to start running the game as a service, we are going to keep the alpha online indefinitely for players to play. During this time, we will unveil new content constantly and introduce a cycle of monthly events that will keep the game world exciting and happening! This may take some time. As you know, Nin Online is heavily based on RP and RP Events, while being a PvP combat game, we've spent the past year or so building up the PvP environment with combat that is fast-paced yet tactical, and diverse in choices for fighting styles, but the RP events and systems will take awhile to work out as a community! The phases of the final alpha Firstly, we will will conduct a closed alpha from the 14 October to the 18 October. During which we will tackle any remaining bugs inhibiting players from enjoying the game. We will be thankful to all participants who help us find bugs and help us balance the game's combat and leveling pace. This phase will be available for all Early Access, Silver Ninja and Gold Ninja. The server will then be taken down for a few days and re-opened fully as the Open Alpha phase, in which anyone can participate. Open Alpha expectations First Hokage will be Rory. There will be a Chunnin Exams held a few weeks post Launch (Open Alpha). When we transition into Beta there may be a wipe. We will try to launch our cosmetics shop feature sometime in Open Alpha. Level cap is 30, jutsus are spread out into their rightful balance. Lots of new features since the last test. Shifts in game design has left certain features untouched (Missions are disabled and will only be reintroduced later as a minor feature instead of being the main game play progression). 1st Chunnin Exams The first Chunnin Exams is ready to go. Since there are no Jounins nor Chunins to lead teams, players may form teams of 3 ninjas on their own. In order to be eligible, all ninjas in the team must be Level 30 and be Genin rank, there will also be a Ryo fee per team. Registration will be done through the forum. There will be 4 stages in-game - Theory Exam, Forest of Death, Preliminaries and Finals. More detailed will be announced soon. All illegible ninjas should stay tuned for the Closed Alpha client in the restricted forum! The client will be out an hour or so before the server goes live for the early access, silver and gold ninjas. Regards, Rory

I'm just as thankful to Seth for keeping everything going while I'm gone.

Dear Ninjas,It's been 1 year and 10 months since enlisted into the Singapore Army for conscription. During these 2 years, there has been many periods of time where I simply could not find any time to work on Nin Online. The game's development was certainly anything but slow for an independent game of this scale, but yet it was nothing compared to the first 6 months of development which was prior to me enlisting into the army.During these past months, the game has been largely ran by my co-creator, Seth. Who has done a great job in keeping the team organized, keeping the game going and programming the game alongside Abhi.A lot of improvements to the game's development has been going on in the background since about a month ago when my Army duties basically ended. But we haven't been posting too many updates. So what will happen now that I'm back full-time? I will be dedicating all my time to creating content and managing the project.Whack aka. Eddie (Co-founder of Nin Online) is back on the team and working on programming.More Development logs, more Live streaming and more player interaction from me.We'll be pushing out the next test ASAP, and thanks to our work over the past month or so, you will love this test. TRUST ME.I'm not going to spoil anything on the new features in the engine and the progress of content here. But stay-tuned for the coming development logs from me!Regards,Rory

Nin Online is lucky to have talented people like you put in hard work to make this game great I hope everyone enjoyed Shikate's first development log and look forward to using these Jutsus in-game.

When I suspected the theme could be an issue, I ran speed tests multiple times. It's exactly the same.

Definitely. But we won't give stat boosts! Lol. Btw, welcome to the community! That's actually a good idea! I'll prototype it soon.

Thanks for all the feedback. @orangeram I promise more orange for you. Also the mobile web is an attempt at responsiveness. It should run efficiently on the mobile and remove the need to zoom in and out on mobile devices. It takes a bit to get used to, and right now some info is lost in the scaling. But I'm using it right now and I like it. @Shawn Jones profiles will always be an important feature! The general layout from the new forum software is already more fun to customize. Check out my animated banner but read on to understand. What actually happened is that we updated the forum software from IPS3.4 to IPS4 which in turn meant a lot of our plugins became outdated. As time goes by, there will be your favorite features back, including profile backgrounds and music. If not by 3rd party plugins, me and Seth will code it ourselves. As for the sluggish performance, it started off with some bad plugins slowing it down, but the speed better now that they're removed. I'll try my best to get it running faster, it may be a variety of factors causing the slow down and I need time to look into all of it.

Vote away!

James, we've never talked about moving to Unity. We've discussed porting to Unity post-release, only once we have a game operationally ready and running. If and when we do port, we will also continue to add content to the current version of the game. This is a project to overcome the limitations of VB6.

I used to talk to Ash quite a bit, he let me play what he was working on with LNO occasionally. I was always glad to see that Nin wasn't the only Project like that back then, it gave me more hope because I wasn't quite sure if Nin was going to make it as it was. LNO was always steps behind though. Ashramaru couldn't even settle on an engine

@Deice I'm glad you did.

Gambling - I can get a player to give me 1000 ryo and I'll roll a dice and see if he gets back 2000 ryo or I kill him. Nice. Kunai darts - What's that? Rooftop races - similar to the idea of climbing trees to me, sounds really fun. Rare NPC Spawns - These would play out better if it was just that at all times in-game there are secret shops around. Weekly dungeons - sounds good. Repairing village - I don't know how that would work. Genjutsu Escape - Sounds a lot like one of those maze games in WC3, sounds fun! hahaha. I'd definitely like to have something like that, but it's still a bit far from happening due to the amount of work on the boss AI that will take. I can do a giftbox drop party. I like the idea of killing an NPC in an enemy village more. But I guess this would be more low-level player friendly.

@Fernando why yes, I would love to drink your tears.

Emotes work when you're facing all directions though, unlike facial expressions.

Seth is being modest right here. He also has made numerous combat & audio improvements.

Nothing lasts forever. Even after we release, in 5-6 years the game will probably be dead. But until then we will have a good naruto fan game to play in.

Tell me when you're free and I'll show you around the game personally. @

Thank you for all the nice comments, next development log will be in a few days Sand village may be here sooner than expected at this rate.

Hey Ninjas, Public Preview Day? I haven't posted previews that even non-registered users could see for a long time. In the past, there would be one of these for every development log.. but I started to just do development logs as I got more comfortable just showing my work to those already registered. So this public preview is for all the lurkers who haven't seen any update in a long time. No the game is not dead, all the progress is documented in the Development Log section, which you need to register to see! You can view our previous public previews here for nostalgia! It really has been a long time hasn't it? Previews! Sharingan aka. Heaven's Eyes I'm sorry to tease. Clans are still a long way from being released, so I just did this one for fun. Binding Pillars Technique You can probably guess how this works. It's a lightning technique that summons four pillars that paralyzes everything within it's boundaries. Kazekage Building I'm back to working on giant buildings again like 2 years ago for the Leaf Village. This took two days to do, so future Kazekage-sama better thank me to death. Thank you for all your continued support. If you aren't already registered, do take your time to, as we will be going into the final Open Alpha stage in a few weeks. Regards, Rory

@Shauri @ don't worry, I read them