Ninja Café was designed in early 2010 to be the first social game on iTV. Unfortunately, TAG's acquisition in June put the game on hold, and it was never completed.

When programming games at TAG, I always had the opportunity to give design input. And I always took advantage of it! I was often teamed with producer/designer Larry Cadelina, who is very good about considering ideas from everyone. We were almost always on the same page with design, so when I pitched him an idea, he would generally like it and we'd integrate it into the game. Likewise, whenever he pitched me an idea for technical analysis, I'd find a way to make it happen - his are always great ideas!

When TAG decided to work on a social game, I was brought into the project as a co-designer and programmer. Larry was the lead designer; Rob Craig and Andrea Lam Leong were fellow co-designers. Though I was used to providing design input, I was never involved in drafting the initial design document. It was a fun, though often grueling, process to work together with a group of designers, and hammer out all the details of a relatively complex game.

Ultimately, we completed the design document. The game was Ninja Café: a restaurant game along the lines of Café World, but with more interactivity. The crux of the design was to make a game that offered as much gameplay as the user wanted - casual users could spend a few minutes a day on the game and still make progress, while hardcore users could spend hours and always have something to do. Conversely, Café World at the time had very little to do each day - you put a couple of dishes on the stove and came back the next day. Our game would also feature a free-form recipe creation process, and an arcade-style serving game mechanic to better suit our audience.

I developed and iterated on a gameplay prototype in Flash, and later started prototyping the game on TAG. It was actually quite an advanced game for the platform. Most games on TAG were considered finished once deployed. Ninja Café, on the other hand, like all social games, would have to be updated very often to keep players interested. To facilitate this, I took advantage of a rarely used dynamic loading system in the platform, and developed a asset package format and a generic asset handling system in the game. I also started building a Windows-based GUI tool that would allow non-technical people to easily create the packages.

Just when things were rolling along with the game, TAG got acquired by another company. Due to shifting priorities caused by the acquisition, the game was put on hold and ultimately cancelled.

Though disappointed by the cancellation, I'm happy to have worked on the game. I got hands-on experience designing a complex game that I wouldn't have had otherwise. I got to think about difficult technical problems, and program a new kind of game that was more dynamic than anything I had worked on before. I just wish we could have finished it - it was a blast to work on, and I know our users would have had just as much fun playing it!