Ahoy-hoy! I’m Dan, pleased to be here! I’m working on 10 Second Ninja X, a tough-as-nails platformer that works a bit like if Super Meat Boy French kissed Trials HD. You have ten seconds to kill all the enemies in each level. The faster you do it, the better rating you get; the better rating you get, the more levels you unlock. You are a ninja. The enemies are robots. Take out insurance on your PS Vita and cover your DualShock 4 in bubble wrap.

It’s blisteringly fast and every frame counts. There are dedicated retry buttons so you’ll be restarting over and over to get that perfect run. No lengthy gaps between checkpoints. No hand holding. You just need to prove that you can be perfect for about three to five seconds per level.

When you do achieve a coveted three star rating, that’s all you. It’s incredibly difficult, to the point where it’s maybe a bad idea for us to be putting it on PS Vita (a system that can easily be thrown across a room in a fit of rage), but we’re going to give it a shot anyway.

10 Second Ninja X plays especially nice with a classic PlayStation directional pad. So it’s maybe a little confusing why I’d feel as nervous as I do writing this blog post. Truth is, we’re pretty big PlayStation fans here at Four Circle Interactive.

The PS2 was the first home console I owned and it was a backbone to my childhood. Launching a game on PlayStation has been the goal ever since I started designing games. Heck, our programmer Daniel (not me) is an even bigger PlayStation fan than I am. Sony gave us PlayStation branded hoodies last year and I’m not sure Daniel’s taken it off once. It’s gross, actually.

Point is, you can understand why I’m getting butterflies. After admiring PlayStation games from afar for so long, it feels like we’re juggling at a talent show in front of our whole school and we’re doing everything we can to ensure that we don’t drop our balls in front of everyone.

We want this to be a game that PlayStation fans are proud of and thankfully I think the game is shaping up really well. It’s not always easy to love the game that you’re making, which is why I’m glad that I sincerely believe 10 Second Ninja X is becoming a great game.

We’re big admirers of OlliOlli, Velocity, and Stealth Inc., and we very much want to bring you a game that lives up to the standards set by them. We’ll find out this summer whether we achieve that, but until then, we’re grateful to have this opportunity to interact with the PlayStation community. Thanks for reading.