In preparation for MAGFest, wonderful artist Astra Wijaya put together some amazing stickers, pins and cards for our booth!
We’ve also decided on a tentative release quarter for the game as well: spring this year! As with all estimates, this can change depending on unforeseen circumstances, but it does mean we’re rapidly approaching release. We hope you look forward to it!
Here are some more close-ups on the MAGFest swag, by the way. Hope to see you there next week!
We won’t be having any Not a Clone updates this weekend due to the Global Game Jam coming up this weekend. This does mean that, yes, we’ll probably be posting our latest game jam game next week. Additionally, our site will be live-streaming our progress below, so you might see us on camera!
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:
We have a pretty short update this week. We hinted last week that Astra Wijaya was working on updating the graphics for a mystery minigame. Turns out, it’s Canabiker!
Not only did he get Canabiker done, Canabot is complete as well:
We also mentioned in our last post that Inverse Mode was in mid-process. We just finished this week, and plan on finishing Challenge Mode next.
Our fifth Ludum Dare was our first attempt at making a simple online multiplayer games. How did we do?
hack.source.net (Ludum Dare 34)
Above average. Fun, innovation, and overall stands above the 20% standing. Innovation in particular stands at the 5% mark, and we certainly ranked within the top 100 in that category, so we’re very proud of that. Our score stands smack in-between 3 and 4 stars out of 5, so it could have been improved. Still, considering what a mess it was trying to develop this game, we’d say it’s pretty good.
How does this compare to our other Ludum Dare games? Let’s check them out in reverse order.
Can I Haz Monsters? (Ludum Dare 33)
Can I Haz Monsters? did do better than hack.source.net in comparison. Seeing that development went much more smoothly for this game, this isn’t a major surprise. A lot of players commended the dialog system in the game, explaining the rather high mood rating.
Star Driller Ultra (Ludum Dare 32)
Star Driller Ultra is easily the highest ranking game we’ve developed. The graphics above should make that pretty obvious. This is also the second Compo game (solo-only), so perhaps the ratings are more reflective of the impressiveness of that accomplishment.
Unconventional Stick Swinging Simulator (Ludum Dare 32)
Joke entry Unconventional Stick Swinging Simulator is naturally the lowest ranking game. No surprises here: it’s made within 12 hours, with a portion of that time devoted in light-baking.
Our attempt to make fun of free-to-play games with Laundry Day is…well, reflective of exactly what we expected people would react to the game. It’s not surprising a deliberately badly made game would get some mild scores.
The Sentient Cube (Ludum Dare 26)
And the first Ludum Dare game has…no ratings, so there’s not much to talk about here.
Removing The Sentient Cube and Unconventional Stick Swinging Simulator, score progression for each game looks like this:
Overall has been dropping since Star Driller Ultra, since we admit being more interested in experimenting in Ludum Dare than making a polished experiment. Still, innovation and fun remains very high, which is fantastic. The rest…well, hasn’t been our focus, really. The same trends can be found in the rankings progression as well:
After a messy game jam and the relaxing holidays, we’re back and working hard to make Not a Clone the best mobile game about mobile games. There has been a lot of tweaks since the last update, so let’s list a couple. First and most notable is inverted objectives: in certain games, the objectives will occasionally change to something else, usually the opposite of the usual instructions. For example, here’s what normally happens to Flappy Sombrero when the sombrero hits a cactus:
With inverted objectives, however, the instructions changes. Instead of flying between the cactus, the sombrero is supposed to fly into it. To make the difference more clearer, we’ve also inverted the colors of the objectives, making it easier to recognize when the objectives has changed.
We’re still in the middle of working on this new mode, so stay tuned!
Speaking of staying in tune, last update, we’ve mentioned that Challenge mode was being implemented, and that certain details may change. One significant change is that you no longer lose a life if you fail the Challenge. As a consequence of this, we’re planning on making Challenge games a lot harder.
There’s also a few updates we’ve made to the opening of the game. First, the loading screen now shows different quips each time you open the game. Second, the number of icons that appears within the first few frames of opening the game now reflects the number of games you have unlocked. For example, the first time you play the game, you have 15 icons visible on the screen:
Lastly, the start screen now has a rolling label below the start button. It changes every couple of seconds to display a new information:
Lastly, we’re going to leave with a mystery concept art our artist put together. Can you guess what it could be?
Last weekend, we took a stab at creating an online multiplayer shooter for the Ludum Dare game jam. If you haven’t seen it already, it’s a fun 2-player experiment where each player can hack the controls of the other player, disabling up to two buttons. Since the original release had a lot of technical problems, we’ve created a post-jam release that improves on the following:
Hopefully these simple changes will improve the playability of the game.
In the meantime, there’s only a few minor updates with Not a Clone: basically our entire team are enjoying their holidays. There is, however, one new feature in works. Called “inverted mode,” the instructions of a couple of minigames may randomly change to something opposite of the originally intended instruction. For example, in a Totemman minigame, the instructions will change from “Slap!” to “Die!” As one would expect, the intended solution to this minigame would be to figure out how to kill your poor character within the time limit. Obviously, there will be a lot of setup necessary for this new mode, such as keeping track of how many times the player won the minigame before allowing inverted mode, or providing a visual indicator for more experienced players. More updates will be coming in the near-future about this neat feature.
Happy holidays to everyone!
We’re adding a new feature to Not a Clone this week! Courtesy of programmer, Taro Omiya, Challenge is a new mode that occurs every 10 apps. For one single app, the difficulty dramatically increases:
The reward, as the animation above implies, is replenishing one life!
But what if you already have all 4 lives? No worries! In fact, life up is just one of the rewards. The other, which occurs much more often if you have more lives, is increasing the score by a drastic amount (4!).
Naturally, succeeding in this app leads to increasing your score dramatically.
So what happens if you lose to challenge mode? Simple: you lose one life, just like the other apps, and lose the opportunity to take the challenge again for 10 more games. Of course, we’ll be play-testing this feature extensively, so a lot of these details are subject to change.
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!
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!