Page Content

• Narrative Structure
• Gameplay
  • Movement
  • Player Characters
  • Non-Player Characters
    • Enemies
    • Bosses
  • Props, Health & Score
• Level Analysis
• Controls

Narrative Structure

The Ninja Turtles advise that Channel 6 reporter, April O'Neil, and Splinter have been abducted by Shredder. The mission is simple: rescue April O'Neil and Splinter and defeat the evil Shredder and his allies.

TMNT in-game footage

Gameplay

In this game, the player can play as one of the four Ninja Turtles (Leonardo, Donatello, Michelangelo and Raphael) and has to pass through 5 different side-scrolling levels to reach the objective and defeat the final boss. To achieve this objective, the player will have to beat all enemies that interpose in the way. It can only be done by direct hand to hand attacks, by smashing them into the walls or by kicking random props of the level to hit them.

Movement

This arcade game is a 2D game that visually seems like a 3D one. For this reason, both, players and enemies, are able to move and jump to all directions (Up, Down, Left and Right). Nevertheless, neither players nor enemies are able to sprint (there is only one speed level) and all movement is foot-in-the-ground for the players --except one special scene in the 3rd level, where players and some enemies move along the scene with skateboards--.

The enemies are not always in the ground. It depends on the type of them: they can just walk, ride on planes or drive motorbikes and cars to run over the player.

Foot-in-the-ground movement

Leonardo on a skateboard and enemies riding on planes

Enemies driving motorbikes

Enemies driving cars

Player Characters

In the original 4-player arcade game, it can be played up to four players simultaneously. Depending on the player's character choice, the game expirience change due to the different Ninja habilities:

Leonardo: Has balanced speed and range attacks.

Donatello: Has slower attacks, but longer range.

Michelangelo and Raphael: Have faster attacks, but shorter range.

The player is not able to shoot any gun or throw any weapon to the enemies during the entire game: all player attacks are hand to hand (only the enemies can shoot or throw weapons to attack the player). Moreover, the player cannot cover himself. To avoid enemies hits, the player has two options: move through the map or jump above them.

Leonardo (blue), Donatello (purple), Michelangelo (orange) and Raphael (red)

Non-Player Characters

Enemies

• Foot Soldiers: These are distinguish by the color of their clothes.

Purple – Unarmed (first stage) or equippied with spears (rest of stages).

Orange - Unarmed (first stage) or equippied with guns (rest of stages).

Pink – Equippied with a mallet or guns.

White – Equippied with kattanas or daggers.

Yellow - Equippied with some form of boomerang, or bombs.

• Mousers: These robots are able to break walls and floors to surprise the player and have the ability to latch onto the player's arm, forcing them to shake it off.

• Roadkill Rodneys: These are robots that have a tentacle that is able to electrocute and paralize the player.

• Tubular Transports: These air enemies are like mosquitos with laser guns to attack the players.

Bosses

• Rocksteady: First boss off the arcade game. It can shoot and kick the player. This enemy also appears in the second bossfight helping Bebop.

• Bebop: Second boss equippied with a Ray-Gun. It can shoot and punch the player.

• Granitor: Third boss equippied with a flame-thrower. It can burn and punch the player. It also jumps and produces a shake in the ground that paralizes the player.

• Traag: The first boss of the final stage. It can shoot with a submachine gun and punch the player.

• Krang: The second boss of the final stage, appearing after defeating Traag. It shoot laser rays from its eyes and can kick the players.

• Oroku Saki: He is the final boss, appearing after deafeating Krang. He can make clones of himself and attacks with a sword and lightning bolts from a device.

Props, Health & Score

There are no object that players can pick up and use as weapons. Even so, there are some interactive props around the player that can be used to hit the enemies, such as parking meters and fire hydrants. Furthermore, there can appear some pizza slices through the level. These pizza boxes act as healers, giving back the health that has been taken from the player previously. However, that kind of props and health items do not appear until the second stage.

Pizza Box

To alert players, some enemies can suddenly appear in front of them by breaking doors and elevators. In addition, there are some in-game "events" in order to surprise the player, such as a group of heavy balls falling from stairs and passing through the map. If any of these balls hit the player, he will receive some damage.

Purple Soldier breaking a door

Heavy ball falling from stairs event

Above the remaining health of each player there is the score of each one. This score reflects how many enemies has the player killed.

Remaining Health of P1 (Green Square) & Score of P1 (Red Square)

Level Analysis

The level objective is to save April O'Neil from his house (is getting burned and full of Shredder soldiers).

In this first level of the game (the one we want to replicate) there are 4 type of little enemies and a final boss.

The player can distguish them by the color of his clothes:

Purple Soldier: Enemy who only atacks the player with melee atacks (without any weapons), those are the most common enemies in the level.

White Soldier: Enemy who atacks the player throwing explosive items (they look like dynamite), throwing knives, and with melee atacks.

Orange Soldier: This enemy attacks the player using mostly melee atacks but can also throw shurikens from far away.

Roadkill Rodneys: This is the strongest little enemy of the level. It has a lot of health and two different atacks, it can shoot with a laser gun or it can hit the player with an electric whip, generating paralysis and getting the life of the player down.

In the last scene of the level, enemies get a bit stronger and start using different weapons: an orange enemy appears with a shotgun and a couple of white enemies are using katanas. Once you beat them, the final boss appears from behind the floor using a perforator.

In this level ther aren't items or power-ups that help you, so it is pretty difficult to beat all the enemies without losing any life.

Level Map

Level Boss Fight Map

Collision Layout

Talking about the colision layout, colison boxes are located in the bodies of each character (interactuable ones), also we can see how the player can move his character not only 2 dimensions but it can move it up and down too, making the player feel that is playing to a 3D game. This type of movement makes that the colison box of the characters can have a lot more of positions, generating a more complex colision layout than a simply 2D game.

• In yellow we find the HitBox of the ninja turtle attack.

• The red color represents the characters' HitBox.

• We use the color white to mark the boundary of the map.

In this level we can find some balls falling from layers at the bottom of the screen, this balls can hit you too, making some sort of interactive entournament and a bit more complexity in the colision layout.

• The red color represents the characters' HitBox.

• We use the color white to mark the boundary of the map.

Controls

In arcade machines, TMNT has the following controls:

• A joystick for movement, a jumping button and another one to attack.

• In addition, each character can perform a special hit by pressing the jump button and the attack button at the same time.

Joysticks and buttons of an arcade machine