Development

The spicy and explosive Not a Clone update

| Taro Omiya

As hinted in our last post, we’ve finally updated our old Gem Ninja microgame — which used placeholder assets — to Bomb Ninja and Bun Ninja. Some of you may note the latter was integrated into the game during a Twitch stream.

Bomb Ninja

Bun Ninja

Similar to the old game, Kittens and Spices will act as things-not-to-slice in each game:

Bomb Ninja Fail

Bun Ninja Fail

We’ll be streaming again at www.twitch.tv/japtar10101 on Tuesday, 3:00 PM EST. Our next game to integrate is based off of this sketch Astra Wijaya created for us. If you want to check out our last stream, check it out below:

Watch live video from japtar10101 on www.twitch.tv

New Spritesheets, and Streaming Schedule

| Taro Omiya

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.

Responding to new minimalism trends

| Taro Omiya

In response to the latest trends, we’ve worked on minimizing any extraneous details from our game. These measures include removing color from our game (who needs those?), and shortening our needlessly long title of our app, Not a Clone to just a Clone.

NewTitleScreenAprilFools

We hope these new measures improves your gameplay experience, and widen our target audience.

Adding story to Not a Clone

| Taro Omiya

Apologize for the lack of updates for a few weeks. Many of us are recovering from the exhausting trip at the Game Developers Conference (GDC), so this week’s update is a small work-in-progress idea we’ve been bouncing around. Born from our writer, Robert Denner, the loading screen has been updated to look like a messenger application, where your friend introduces you to Not a Clone store.  Here’s a rough sketch below:

NewLoadingScreen

Obviously, we have a lot of work to do on improving this screen, but it does mean we now have a progressing story in our game. In other news, Taro Omiya has been working hard on integrating leaderboards into the game, while Astra Wijaya and Chase Bethea has been adding new assets into the game. We may start a Twitch stream soon in regards to our development process, now that we think of it…

The Screen-Shattering Not a Clone Update!

| Taro Omiya

Last week, we shown a sketch of a few clicker microgames. We just finished integrating them into the game, and they’ll take the place of Box Clicker, posted back in August last year. Many thanks to Astra Wijaya for putting the graphics together.

Flower Clicker3

So how does one play Flower Clicker or Phone Clicker. Simply tap the screen by exactly the number of times noted by the instructions. Be careful, though: if you tap too many times, you may lose your screen!

Phone Clicker4

In other news, Taro Omiya has been very busy writing up an academic article for Game on Games on the G|A|M|E Journal. The full details of the development process for Not a Clone may be coming soon!

MAGFest 2016 in summary

| Taro Omiya

Hello, everyone! We’re back from MAGFest 2016!

The reception has been incredible, and we want to thank everyone who visited and played our game. As it turns out, our survey revealed that everyone loved Not a Clone. Everyone answered they wanted to play it again, and the grand majority indicated they’d rate the game 5 out of 5 or 4 out of 5.

Now that we’re back from MAGFest, we’re working hard to finish the game. The good news is that we only have a few months of work left before we release. Our artist is already hard-at-work getting the next minigame sketched. How would these mysterious minigames play?

sketch01

First 2 days of MAGFest 2016

| Taro Omiya

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)