Development

Not a Clone Update: Mundane Housework

| Taro Omiya

Apologize for the silent treatment these last two weeks. As some of you may have noticed, last week, we’ve updated the demo with the following changes:

  1. Adjusting how the first couple of microgames are selected.
  2. Updating sound effects for…
    1. 8
    2. Ridiculous Pinatas
    3. Bun Ninja
  3. Changing how the microgame’s background music play. It will cut-off if you’ve succeeded or failed in the middle of it.
  4. Making Ridiculous Pinatas bounce less off the invisible walls
  5. Adding a cat on the loading screen.

But let’s get to the meat of things: when are we going to get a release date for Not a Clone? After all, we’ve been saying we’re nearly done with major features in the game; it’s got to be soon, right?

In short, our answer is: “when it’s done.” We strive to provide the best experience we can to our players, and while the game is insanely close to completion, we still have a few more mundane and/or private housework to do. Future updates on this project will remain low-key until we have everything ready. As such, we do not have plans to live-stream the Not a Clone development next Tuesday.

Thank you for your patience!

Not a Clone Update: Taking on Beta Suggestions

| Taro Omiya

We have a short update for Not a Clone this weekend. Since last weekend, we’ve started working on implementing suggestions and fixing bugs reported by beta testers. One of those is improving the tutorial. You may recall the old tutorial, which looked like this:

tutorial

A few testers had pointed out it was difficult to tell that they had to tap on a specific button when this finger appeared. Our new tutorial uses a spotlight effect to bring focus to specific buttons:

newSpotlightGameOver1

Another tester pointed out they never knew they could tap on the Lucky Coin. As a response, we’ve added a tutorial for the rare coin as well.

newSpotlightLuckCoin

We’ll have more of these small-but-important fixes in the upcoming stream next Tuesday, but if you’d like to see how we implemented the features above, we have a Youtube video below:

Not a Clone Update: What’s This? Another Demo Release?

| Taro Omiya

Some of you may have noticed that a new version of Not a Clone Demo has been released. This is quite a rapid turnout compared to the last release, which came out a full month after the demo debuted. What’s going on?

In short, we’ve been syncing the code and assets for the demos with the recent private beta releases so that both will have the latest development changes in the game. This should help us respond more quickly to the comments on the demo and from the beta testers. Of course, since we’re now working on bugs and small enhancements, the changes between the different versions of the demo will be relatively minor.

In any case, we haven’t actually posted the changes made since the first release, so here’s an extensive list on what’s been done so far:

  1. Updated how the loading screen looks to appear more like a text message screen.
  2. Changed the bottom of game over screen to use less screen-estate.  High scores button is now placed in-between restart and home button.
  3. Added a new music for challenge mode.
  4. Added more sound effects, both for pop-up events and a couple of microgames.
  5. Updated credits to include our current beta testers.
  6. Reduced WebGL memory usage by packing sprites into less image files.  PC/Mac/Linux build remains unchanged.
  7. Updated Angry Monkeys’ physics.  The monkeys no longer collides with the slingshot or each other, and the shot-direction is based on the position you’ve let go of the slingshot, not the direction the sling moves.
  8. Background music now fades-in before a microgame starts.
  9. Reduced memory usage on all platforms by loading most sound effects and music on-the-fly.
  10. Clicking on the pause button no longer triggers a mouse-down event on a microgame.
  11. Made challenge mode a lot easier by dramatically increasing the amount of time available to the player.  The previous times assumed the game was played on a multi-touch-supporting touchscreen, but there is now a different time set for mouse.
  12. Fixed a few typos in the loading screen’s text messages.
  13. Doubled the animation speed of Light Tiles.
  14. How the first couple of microgames are selected is a lot less random.  If the player’s best score is below 15, they will always be served with a predetermined order of microgames.  If they score higher than or equal to 15, the first 10 microgames are those that either have low number of plays, or a low rate of winning.
  15. Fixing “Clone of:” label not being translated properly in Pig Latin (fun fact: the language’s purpose is to confirm our localization script works).
  16. The speed-up is calculated differently.  It’s a little easier in the beginning, but gets harder towards the end.

Let us know what you think of the changes!

Not a Clone Update: Keeping it short

| Taro Omiya

A quick update on Not a Clone: as many of you may have noticed, a few days ago, we’ve update the demo build to a new version 1.1. The changes are fairly small for the demo itself–the biggest change is how the loading screen appears–but it also synchronizes the build with where we’re at with our current development. From here on out, we’ll be updating the demo builds more often as we approach completion, so stay tuned!

Our last two live streams focused on general polish. Last week, for example, we updated the price of every microgame, using Google Sheets as a reference:

Last Tuesday, we showed the beginning of updating the randomizer that serves the sequence of microgames to the player:

As usual, we’ll be continuing our weekly Twitch live-stream next Tuesday, 3:00 PM EDT at twitch.tv/japtar10101.

Not a Clone update: Prepping for Private Beta!

| Taro Omiya

Happy Fourth of July weekend! This week, we’ve been gearing up to send out a private beta build next week. As many of you may know, beta testing is a simple quality assurance measure to make sure bugs are fixed, and the game’s economy is balanced well. Unfortunately, due to the rampant cloning (heh) and piracy in certain app stores, we’ll be keeping this build internal.

In the meantime, here are some development updates! As noted earlier, we are now focusing on polishes. Last Tuesday, Taro Omiya modified the behavior of two games, Phone Clicker and Angry Monkeys. Here’s what Phone Clicker looked like before the change:

Phone Clicker4

And here’s what it looks like after the change. Notice any difference?

newPhoneClicker

That’s right: we’ve replaced the number of taps made on Phone Clicker to a bunch of fingerprints. It’s a small, but noticeable way to create distinctions between microgames that are functionally similar to each other.

The changes made to Angry Monkeys, on the other hand, are more subtle. Here’s the before:

Angry Monkeys

And here’s the after. Notice some changes made to the physics:

newAngryMonkeys

We’ve set the monkeys and the slingshot to not collide with each other. Furthermore, when the monkey is flung into the air, its trajectory will not be in the mercy of the string behavior, but rather, the position you’ve let go of the slingshot. Overall, this should make the game more predictable and easier to play.

Last but not least: Astra Wijaya has update the upgrade graphics to look cleaner, as demonstrated in the game list screenshot below:

newUpgrades

As usual, we’ll be continuing our weekly Twitch live-stream next Tuesday, 3:00 PM EDT at twitch.tv/japtar10101. If you missed the last one, where we’ve made the changes described above, you can check it out in the Youtube video below. See you next time!

Not a Clone update: notifications

| Taro Omiya

We’re rapidly approaching completion with Not a Clone! At this point, almost all of the major features are implemented, and we are making some small incremental changes in preparation for release. For example, the newest addition to our game is an animation for the notification icon that appears on the Shop button:

notification

Oddly enough, this effort came about due to a necessary bug fix that the notification number did not accurately reflect the number of microgames you could buy from the shop. Similarly, while we had the Lucky Coin feature for a while (a coin you can tap in-between games to get more in-game currency), we only recently implemented a method to unlock the feature. Astra Wijaya has been hard at work to put the sketching the last few necessary bits on unlocking the upgrade.

Screen_Shot_2016-06-23_at_17.59.06_
Screen_Shot_2016-06-23_at_17.59.30_

We’ll be continuing our weekly Twitch live-stream next Tuesday, 3:00 PM EDT at twitch.tv/japtar10101. Our plan is to implement a few improvements for microgames that a few people had problems with. If you missed the last one, where we created a method to unlock the Lucky Coin, you can check it out in the Youtube video below.