Ninja Brigade Looks Good and Sounds Better

Jonah Weingarten's NINJA BRIGADE is a nostalgic metroidvania from a four-person Hamburg team, profiled in October 2020 as part of Gamecity Hamburg's Games Lift Incubator coverage. The game began with a soundtrack: keyboardist and composer Jonah Weingarten, a friend of developer Nico Plötz since 2014 and a member of the metal band Pyramaze, approached Plötz with an 80s retro-wave, symphonic score that lacked a game. Plötz saw it as ideal for a metroidvania in the spirit of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, and Weingarten joined as creative consultant and as the playable hero, tattoos included.

The story has Weingarten sucked into an arcade and fighting through a world inspired by feudal Japan. He faces yokai, can transform into an Oni, and traverses levels themed on the five elements of Japanese Buddhism. Although music, visuals, and gameplay evoke the 1980s, the team deliberately avoids strict imitation, using a richer color palette and effects impossible on period hardware. Robin Stephan wants gameplay that sits between slow exploration and fast hit-and-run, with roaming enemies whose patterns players must read. The world is hand-designed rather than procedurally generated and packed with secrets.

The team consists of Plötz, Stephan (direction and development), Annemarie Ollendorf (UI and assets), and Victoria Kmiec (enemies and visual effects). All are students or alumni of SAE Institute Hamburg, and this is their first commercial project together. Scope is kept deliberately controlled: the game is meant to be "not especially big, but well-rounded."

Development was described as approaching alpha. The next milestone was a playable demo for the Incubator's milestone pitch, with beta targeted for the end of 2020 and a full launch in the second quarter of 2021, according to Stephan's optimistic outlook.