Not a Clone update: Prepping for Private Beta!

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: Improving graphics in Not Angry Things

What’s this!? A new update on Not a Clone!? Yup, we finally have something new to show off since the brainstorming sketches nearly three weeks ago.

First, the graphics in the clones formerly known as Not Angry Things and Not Angry Disks has been changed to Angry Monkeys and Angry Thieves respectively. Why? Well, you might recall the old minigames looked something like this:

prototypeLichtenstein08Game07

Now they look like this:

angryMonkeysangryThieves

And the renaming seemed appropriate. Thanks again to Astra Wijaya for the graphical improvements.


On a different note, I believe I haven’t introduced the rest of the team members working on this project. We’re a four-men team, consisting of:

  1. Myself, Taro Omiya, as the game designer and programmer (and the creator of the original game)
  2. Astra Wijaya, naturally, as the artist
  3. Chase Bethea as the sound designer
  4. and lastly, Dylan Bramblett as programmer.

I’m going to do my best to give some highlights to other features implemented in the game so that other team members can get their spotlight, too. First, Dylan put together a translation interface that reads in a spreadsheet like the one below:

TranslationSpreadsheet

And turns it into texts that changes based on the player’s language settings. Since we’re early in development, there haven’t been any translations outside of Pig Latin. Still, when we do finalize every texts in the game, we should be able to translate the game to other languages very quickly.

Here’s to hoping the next update will come quickly (without E3 bothering us).