Changes made for Not a Clone iOS approval

Time for some bit of transparency. We released our game, Not a Clone last Thursday, but that journey wasn’t without some bumps. As you would expect from a satirical game, we did receive a rejection from Apple once, and had to make a few minor changes to the game so they would approve it on the AppStore. Their concern was that our app mimicked the home screen and AppStore too well. For reference, here are the two screens in question:

startscreen4

Shop

In response, we’ve made the following changes:

  1. Skip the starting animation, and jump right to the end of it.
  2. Make all the icons squares.

As such, the two new screens looks like as follows:

approvedstartscreen3

approvedtopapps

Fortunately, that’s all that we needed to do. We were surprised ourselves.

There’s also been a long lull before we started making weekly updates again a few weeks ago. We were actually spending most of that time asking professional help on legal matters. We didn’t think it was particularly interesting for most people. Still, it did lead to this funny joke on the start screen:

disclaimer

And hey, it gave us a little time to add in an Easter Egg as part of the completion bonus! Have you found it yet? Let us know!

Short Not a Clone Update: 11th Hour Bugs

Hey, everyone. Have a short update today. At the start of last week, we’ve submitted the latest — and we hoped, last — beta builds to our Beta testers. We’re glad we did, because one of them reported a terrible bug: the game would crash the moment it started! It took us the entire week, but we’ve finally figured out the problem. It turns out the Google Play Games Service plugin for Unity game engine crashes if it tries to log its status.

Also, Apple’s build uploading system seems to be borked as of today. We’re still investigating on this matter:

errorimporting

We’ll be sending out an update build to all the Beta testers (the thirteenth one, believe it or not) this week, and have a one-week long testing session again. Hopefully this time, we won’t encounter any issues!

Not a Clone Update: New Trailer & Release Estimate

Another week, another update, and this is probably the most exciting yet! First, we have a new trailer, edited by Astra Wijaya:

Notice something at the end? That’s right, we plan on releasing Not a Clone this month! We’re distributing the release candidate to our beta testers this week. Assuming they encounter no major bugs and the submission approval process goes well, we should be able to release this game by the middle of this month. This is quite an exciting time for all of us!

Robert Denner (writer), Astra Wijaya (artist), and Jason Harlow (artist) were hard at work finishing the last bits of the game. The art dump below were the last set of things needed to finish the game. Give it up for these three hard-working developers!

appstoreimages01appstoreimages02appstoreimages03appstoreimages04appstoreimages0510sessions100sessionsscore100score15nacchallengecompletemigitw02baddude01blockguy01interestingguy01hacker02colorguy1-ssnac-ssvalleygirl-sscolorblocksguy-ssmathkid-ss02

Again, there are no changes to the demo build yet. We will be working on updating it, though!

Not a Clone Update: New Icon

What’s this? A new Not a Clone update! That’s right, we’re still alive and kicking! Much of our work this month has been about preparing admin-related tasks, but there are some new updates. For one, we have a new icon, drawn by the talented Jason Harlow:

icon1024r

The loading screen has also been updated with new texts and icons. Here are just a few previews on the kind of story we’ll be having by release:

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And have we mentioned we now have achievements!? We do! Granted, they’re currently few and far between, but do not worry: we have much bigger plans with those, so stay tuned!

Incidentally, there are no changes to the demo build, yet. Much of the changes above do not appear in the demo build, so there hasn’t been a need. We’ll let you know when one is coming, however.

Not a Clone Update: Quicker Transitions

Hello, everyone!  Back again with a new update! A new demo version, version 1.4.0, was just released, with one new feature: quicker transitions. Once the player has shown adeptness with a microgame, the game will jump right to the objective (as depending on the microgame, it may change), shortening the transition from one microgame to another by about 30%. To get a better understanding of how that feels, this is how slow the transitions are for beginning players:

longerInstructions

And this is how fast the transition will be for more skilled players:

shorterInstructions

As usual, here is the list of changes with the latest build:

  1. Shortening the transition from one microgame to another as demonstrated above.
  2. Updating Practice to always show the gesture the first 3 games, then skip to the objective for the rest of the games.
  3. Creating minor improvements to the graphics on the WebGL builds.
  4. Adjusting the condition on when the inverted instructions starts appear. They kick-in a little after the shorter transitions kick-in.
  5. Improving the music-to-sound-effect balancing on a couple of microgames.