We’re live-streaming our post-mortem of our mobile game, Not a Clone, live at IGDA Albany (11/2/2016, 7:00 PM EST)! Check it out on our stream below.
Not a Clone Post-Mortem: Live!
Twitch
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:
And here’s what it looks like after the change. Notice any difference?
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:
And here’s the after. Notice some changes made to the physics:
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:
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
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:
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.
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.
Not a Clone Update: Tutorial
Apologize for the lack of update last week. Our regular poster here, Taro Omiya, was sick last weekend. But now he’s doing a lot better!
Our latest Not a Clone updates are general User Interface (UI) polishes, in preparation for the looming release. As those who played our free demo will recognize, we have a rather unusual loading screen that provides messages to the player. We’ve polished this to look more like a text message application it was intended to look like. Both our artist, Astra Wijaya, and writer, Robert Denner (a past collaborator on Letters From Secret Santa, and the person who came up with the text messaging idea), are hard at work putting finishing touches to this unique story-telling medium.
Also debuted with the free demo are the music! The ever-so-talented composer, Spencer Bambrick, has put together some great music for this game, including the calming menu theme below. Check it out!
Finally, Taro Omiya has been putting together some extra polishes to the game over screen, including a short tutorial on how to navigate the shop menu.
We’ll be continuing our weekly Twitch live-stream next Tuesday, 3:00 PM EDT at twitch.tv/japtar10101. Our plan is to add new purchasable upgrades to the game! If you missed the last one, where we constructed the new text message loading screen, you can check it out in the Youtube video below.
Not a Clone Update: Ridiculous Piñatas
While we had to skip the update last week due to some life-related reasons, we’re back with some new information about Not a Clone! First, the great news: we’ll be uploading a demo version of the game very soon. This will provide a sneak-peek at what’s in store for the full version. The full version of the game, meanwhile, still needs a few more polishes (mainly bug fixes) and an occasional feature or two.
For this week, we’ve successfully integrated Astra Wijaya’s artwork to Ridiculous Piñatas. Those who watched our stream might recall the large number of problems we had with this microgame, but rest assured it’s been fixed as proven by the clip below:
Also new to a game is a new unlockable: the lucky coin. Every once-in-a-while, a coin will appear in the menu that transitions from one minigame to the other. Tapping on it provides more money to spend in the shop later.
We will NOT be streaming next week, as we’ll be busy putting together finishing polishes to the demo build. Still, stay tuned!
Not a Clone Update: Ridiculous Rockets
We have a short Not a Clone update this week. We finished integrating Astra Wijaya’s artwork for Ridiculous Rockets last Tuesday (May 10th, 3:00 PM EDT) in our weekly live-stream:
As always, our stream’s highlight is available here: twitch.tv/japtar10101/v/65721074.
Next Tuesday’s 3:00 PM EDT stream (at twitch.tv/japtar10101) will cover the last microgame that needs art integration before release! The rest of the stream will focus on adding the last few left-over features in the game.
The Not a Clone Update to Unlock All Secrets
Our weekly live-stream continued last Tuesday (April 26th, 3:00 PM EDT) with a completion of Unlock, the handy puzzle micro-game about moving a key out of its keyhole. The end result? We’ve successfully integrated Astra Wijaya’s artwork to a thrilling tale of thievery:
For those interested, our stream’s highlight is available here: twitch.tv/japtar10101/v/63164094. This still leaves one more sketch from last week’s Not a Clone post, which will be the highlight of this Tuesday’s 3:00 PM EDT stream (twitch.tv/japtar10101). That said, we still have more new sketches!
More mysterious microgame sketches approaches!
Last post, we’ve mentioned we would stream last Tuesday at 3:00 PM EST. Unfortunately, due to a schedule conflict, were we not able to stream that day (we did stream ourselves playing Ludum Dare 35 games, though). On the plus side, we did release a new game during the game jam!
We will be busy handling Ludum Dare-related business for the next two weeks, but we do have a few updates on Not a Clone. As usual, Astra Wijaya put together a few sketches for the next set of microgames we’ll be working on:
What will these microgames be? Tune in next week to find out!
Edit: Oh, whoops, we forgot to mention that Pushing Buttons is now done:
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!
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.