Not a Clone Update: New Demo, Future Plans!

Those keen-eyed followers of Not a Clone may have noticed that a new build has been released for both the iOS and Android full-releases, as well as the demo releases on various web portals. What’s new in these builds? Let’s start with the changes in the full release.

Due to many requests, Not a Clone now supports iOS 9. We confess that the only reason iOS 10 was the only supported OS on release of the game was due to the fact that we haven’t tested the game thoroughly on older devices. It would be really embarrassing for us to release a game that hardly runs on your device, so we took the cautious route. Fortunately, we have recently confirmed that the game runs smoothly on iPad 2 and iPhone 4S, so we marked the game to support iOS 9!

For Android, the animated start screen is back! That’s right, this goofy title animation can be experienced in its full glory:

startscreen4

For both platforms, we updated the description of the Extra Life upgrade to have two possible entries. Here’s the original, which is still in the game:

extralifedescription2

And here’s the new description:

extralifedescription

Why have two descriptions for a single upgrade? As it turns out, Not a Clone has some adoptive difficulty modifications: the first upgrade you earn from the tutorial actually changes depending on your score. For most people, they’ll earn the Extra Life upgrade for free; for better skilled people, however, their first upgrade will be Blinged-Out Case. For the latter crowd, Extra Life does make an appearance on the shop later…but not as a free upgrade. Thus, the original description wouldn’t work for these audience.

Incidentally, support the charity movement this weekend!

For the demo, we’ve basically updated the code base to match the release version of Not a Clone. Additionally, the Coming Soon dialog has now changed to Available Now, since the game is obviously released.


As mentioned in the Post-Mortem this week, we do have a ton of free updates planned for this game. For the first major update, which we estimate to be released during the holiday seasons, are more achievements. Some of them will reward prizes for achieving them, too! We’re also planning on adding more microgames, including a few that will be unlocked by default. There will be more upgrades, of course, and a few convenience options will be added in, such as low-power mode. So we hope you look forward to those new changes.

If you haven’t seen it already, here’s the past recording available on Twitch:

Watch live video from on www.twitch.tv

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!

New Spritesheets, and Streaming Schedule

This week’s Not a Clone update is by Astra Wijaya, who put these beautiful spritesheets together for the next pair of microgames. We’ll be implementing these graphics live on Twitch at Tuesday, 3:00 PM EST, channel twitch.tv/japtar10101. So stay tuned!

BunNinja

BombNinja

In the meantime, the leaderboard integration for iOS Taro Omiya was implementing is now complete. We’ll be working on Android next, though as noted earlier, will only be supported on Android version 4.0 or higher.

New trailer, game over screen redux, and more!

Many apologize for the super-late update. We’ve had a lot of events occur between updates, including a move to the new office!

The New Office!
The New Office!

But that doesn’t mean we didn’t make any progress. First is a new trailer that includes our updated menus:

Naturally, the new Top Charts is the highlight for this trailer. Next up, the Game Over has a new two-page look to it. We’re still developing the screen, but here’s a brief preview:

Score Screen
Score Screen
Played Games List Screen
Played Games List Screen

Lastly, Astra Wijaya is at it again with a new concept art for a minigame. Can you guess which one?

NotACloneScreenshotSaturday6-3