First 2 days of MAGFest 2016

The first 2 days of MAGFest 2016 can be summarized with just one word: wow! Thanks for all those who came to our booth and played our game, Not a Clone. The response has been absolutely amazing. Plus, even Wario approved!

We’re still parsing through the feedback we’ve received, but it looks like we’re still on-schedule for that Spring release! There hasn’t been any bad bugs during everyone’s play-session, so things are only going to get better here.

MAGFest (6)

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:

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 #OneGameAMonth: Impossible Poker

For Global Game Jam 2015 at MAGFest, our team created a new social card game where everyone playing does not know the rules to the game. Enter Impossible Poker, a game about deciphering the rules of the game. It can be played with 4 or more players, a pack of playing cards, some tokens, and 2 makeshift cards/pieces of paper saying yes or no on one side, and blank on the other.

The full instructions can be read (along with a smart random rules generator to see some example rules) at the Impossible Poker game page, but here is the quick summary of the rules.

  1. At the start of the game, designate one person as the RuleMaster who creates a secret rule.
  2. Each player is handed out cards until they have five cards in their hands, or until there are no cards left to draw from.
  3. Each player plays a card.  Based on the RuleMaster’s secret rule and the game’s default rules (the highest valued card wins), the RuleMaster declares which card won.
  4. The RuleMaster will take the played cards and stack them for the players to see.  The top card of this stack should be the card that won.
  5. Repeat step 2 through 4 until the 3rd round.
  6. On every 3rd round, the players can either ask 1 yes-or-no question (e.g. does the color of the card matter?), in which the RuleMaster will answer privately with the yes or no cards, or make 1 guess on the rules (e.g. is the rule, “the closest value to 4 wins?”), in which the RuleMaster will answer whether the player is correct or not publicly.
  7. If no-one guesses correctly, the game resumes, repeating step 2-6.
  8. Players can guess or ask a yes-no question at any time, but each individual has only have 3 chances to do this.  In doing so, they must pay one token to ask this question to the RuleMaster.  The RuleMaster will answer in the same fashion they would on every 3rd round.
  9. Should a player run out of all 3 chances, they must wait for the next 3rd round.
  10. The first player to guess the game’s rule wins, and get to be the next RuleMaster.

It’s very fun (and challenging!) to play, and can be setup both cheaply and quickly.  Try it out with your friends!