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— Omiya Games (@OmiyaGames) November 7, 2016
Not a Clone Give-Away on Twitter!
Author: Taro Omiya
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:
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:
And here’s the new description:
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:
Not a Clone Post-Mortem: Live!
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.
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:
In response, we’ve made the following changes:
- Skip the starting animation, and jump right to the end of it.
- Make all the icons squares.
As such, the two new screens looks like as follows:
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:
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!
Not a Clone is Released!!!
Well, let’s get right to it.
Not a Clone is released!!! You can grab it on AppStore (iPhone and iPads) and Google Play (Androids) right now:
That’s right! After developing this game for almost 2 years since the #OneGameAMonth prototype, we’ve finally finished this incredibly ambitious project. We want to thank you all for following our development and supporting us to the very end.
Without further ado, let’s celebrate!
Angry Thieves
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:
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!
Not a Clone Update: New Trailer & Release Estimate
Another week, another update, and this is probably the most exciting yet! First, we have a new trailer, edited by Astra Wijaya:
Notice something at the end? That’s right, we plan on releasing Not a Clone this month! We’re distributing the release candidate to our beta testers this week. Assuming they encounter no major bugs and the submission approval process goes well, we should be able to release this game by the middle of this month. This is quite an exciting time for all of us!
Robert Denner (writer), Astra Wijaya (artist), and Jason Harlow (artist) were hard at work finishing the last bits of the game. The art dump below were the last set of things needed to finish the game. Give it up for these three hard-working developers!
Again, there are no changes to the demo build yet. We will be working on updating it, though!
Through Oneself Gameplay
Not a Clone Update: New Icon
What’s this? A new Not a Clone update! That’s right, we’re still alive and kicking! Much of our work this month has been about preparing admin-related tasks, but there are some new updates. For one, we have a new icon, drawn by the talented Jason Harlow:
The loading screen has also been updated with new texts and icons. Here are just a few previews on the kind of story we’ll be having by release:
And have we mentioned we now have achievements!? We do! Granted, they’re currently few and far between, but do not worry: we have much bigger plans with those, so stay tuned!
Incidentally, there are no changes to the demo build, yet. Much of the changes above do not appear in the demo build, so there hasn’t been a need. We’ll let you know when one is coming, however.