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!

We have a MAGFest booth!

That’s right, we have a booth for MAGFest Indie Videogame Show (MIVS) at the National Harbor! This is an exciting milestone to us, and we definitely hope to see you there!

For this week’s Not a Clone update, we finally finished Challenge Mode we’ve been talking about last week:

As detailed earlier, Challenge Mode is a mode that occurs after reaching a certain score. For one game, you’ll have to play through its 3 difficulty levels back-to-back within 10 seconds. The reward for succeeding in this minigame is either a score increase of 4 points, or gaining back one life. Failing results in…nothing, actually. You just lose the opportunity get the score boost or life up. Consider it a freebie!

Incidentally, Inverted Mode can stack on top of Challenge Mode, giving a small chance of making the challenge a lot easier:

New feature: Inverted Objectives!

After a messy game jam and the relaxing holidays, we’re back and working hard to make Not a Clone the best mobile game about mobile games. There has been a lot of tweaks since the last update, so let’s list a couple. First and most notable is inverted objectives: in certain games, the objectives will occasionally change to something else, usually the opposite of the usual instructions. For example, here’s what normally happens to Flappy Sombrero when the sombrero hits a cactus:

ObjectiveNormal1

With inverted objectives, however, the instructions changes. Instead of flying between the cactus, the sombrero is supposed to fly into it. To make the difference more clearer, we’ve also inverted the colors of the objectives, making it easier to recognize when the objectives has changed.

ObjectiveInverted2

We’re still in the middle of working on this new mode, so stay tuned!

Speaking of staying in tune, last update, we’ve mentioned that Challenge mode was being implemented, and that certain details may change. One significant change is that you no longer lose a life if you fail the Challenge. As a consequence of this, we’re planning on making Challenge games a lot harder.

There’s also a few updates we’ve made to the opening of the game. First, the loading screen now shows different quips each time you open the game. Second, the number of icons that appears within the first few frames of opening the game now reflects the number of games you have unlocked. For example, the first time you play the game, you have 15 icons visible on the screen:

StartScreenApps

Lastly, the start screen now has a rolling label below the start button. It changes every couple of seconds to display a new information:

StartScreenRollingText

Lastly, we’re going to leave with a mystery concept art our artist put together. Can you guess what it could be?

Bicyclabult

New feature: Challenge!

We’re adding a new feature to Not a Clone this week! Courtesy of programmer, Taro Omiya, Challenge is a new mode that occurs every 10 apps. For one single app, the difficulty dramatically increases:

ChallengeLifeUp2

The reward, as the animation above implies, is replenishing one life!

LifeUp2

But what if you already have all 4 lives? No worries! In fact, life up is just one of the rewards. The other, which occurs much more often if you have more lives, is increasing the score by a drastic amount (4!).

ChallengeScoreUp

Naturally, succeeding in this app leads to increasing your score dramatically.

ScoreUp2

So what happens if you lose to challenge mode? Simple: you lose one life, just like the other apps, and lose the opportunity to take the challenge again for 10 more games. Of course, we’ll be play-testing this feature extensively, so a lot of these details are subject to change.

The Joyride updates!

Last time, we hinted that Astra Wijaya had some new updates to show off. This week, we’ve got some GIFs to cover those updates!

CerealJoyride

JetbootsJoyride2

In other news, we were hard at work submitting to the MAGFest Indie Video Game Showcase these few weeks, so if it sounded like we disappeared again, it’s actually due to tight deadlines and upcoming holidays that’s been breaking up our update schedule. Still, we can say with confidence that since our commitment to simplify and lengthen the game, Not a Clone has been drastically improving. While playtesting from a few months ago resulted in a lot of confusion, our local demonstration this month at the Rensselaer Game Showcase and TVGS’ monthly Interactive Showcase were exceedingly positive. We still have a lot of work left to do, but we can assure with the latest feedback that the game will be much more fun than the original prototype!

New Not a Clone graphics and minigames

Hello, everyone! This month, we’ll be in a bit of a hiatus because we will be volunteering on teaching kids how to make games throughout this summer. We should be back in normal schedule starting September.

Fortunately, we do have some updates this week! The first is the usual Astra Wijaya graphic updates, this time on Flappy Fly into Flappy Comic:

FlappyComicBig

Much more cooler, however, is that we’re now creating new minigames as well! So far, we have two previews. Let’s see if you can guess how they play:

Mystery minigame 1
Mystery minigame 1
Mystery Minigame 2
Mystery Minigame 2

(Don’t look at the tags! That’s cheating!)

Sound Effect Updates in Not a Clone

This week’s Dev Log update on Not a Clone isn’t graphical, but rather, auditory. Specifically, this week’s update is on the sound effects that plays within the game’s menus. The video below demonstrates the changes made to the auditory experience of the game (background music* has yet to change, though).

Full credit goes to Chase Bethea for putting together these sounds so quickly.


One other fine-tuning worth mentioning: we’ve made Disco Hexagon and other similar minigames easier to play by making the controls and obstacle placement more obvious to the player:

Disco Hexagon5

In comparison, here’s a screenshot to the older, more cryptic game, which immediately had the walls converge into the middle at the start of the game:

Game10

We hope this change provides a much more pleasant experience to the player.

* All music created by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Ouroboros“, “Local Forecast“, “Hidden Agenda“, “Winner Winner!“, “Beachfront Celebration“, “George Street Shuffle“, and “Carefree” are
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

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).