This week’s Dev Log update on Not a Clone isn’t graphical, but rather, auditory. Specifically, this week’s update is on the sound effects that plays within the game’s menus. The video below demonstrates the changes made to the auditory experience of the game (background music* has yet to change, though).
Full credit goes to Chase Bethea for putting together these sounds so quickly.
One other fine-tuning worth mentioning: we’ve made Disco Hexagon and other similar minigames easier to play by making the controls and obstacle placement more obvious to the player:
In comparison, here’s a screenshot to the older, more cryptic game, which immediately had the walls converge into the middle at the start of the game:
We hope this change provides a much more pleasant experience to the player.
Continuing our updates on Not a Clone’s progress, we’ve got a new mockup for a minigame:
Art, again, is courtesy of Astra Wijaya.
In regards to other updates, there’s been a few small tweaks to the UI. For example, the loading screen now provides the definition of a clone:
A lot of people who play-tested our game didn’t know what a clone was, so we put the definition up on the loading screen to educate our players. Second, the game over screen now provides some fascinating (or depressing) facts about clone-related practices:
As mentioned on Twitter, last weekend, many of our teammates were responsible for putting together the River Jam game jam. We weren’t able to post any updates on our project back then.
During the same week, our team had an emergency discussion about the difficulty of navigating the Game Over screen. As you may recall, the old game over screen looked like this:
Back then, we wanted to hammer the idea that the minigames they were playing were clones of other mobile games. From the feedback we received, though, it seems we made the menus too obtuse. As such, we’ve redesigned the menu to make it easier to get back into the game:
What do you think?
Incidentally, one major change we’re working on in Not a Clone is adding difficulty levels. For example, if you just started the game, and played the Angry Monkeys minigame, this is how many fruits you need to hit:
Easy Mode
As you clear more minigames, the number of fruits will keep increasing:
Medium Mode
Until it fills up the whole screen:
Hard Mode
This effort is courtesy of Taro Omiya, who was compelled to address himself in third-person. While this feature is still a work-in-progress, it should be pretty clear how this improves on the original game.
What’s this!? A new update on Not a Clone!? Yup, we finally have something new to show off since the brainstorming sketches nearly three weeks ago.
First, the graphics in the clones formerly known as Not Angry Things and Not Angry Disks has been changed to Angry Monkeys and Angry Thieves respectively. Why? Well, you might recall the old minigames looked something like this:
Now they look like this:
And the renaming seemed appropriate. Thanks again to Astra Wijaya for the graphical improvements.
On a different note, I believe I haven’t introduced the rest of the team members working on this project. We’re a four-men team, consisting of:
Myself, Taro Omiya, as the game designer and programmer (and the creator of the original game)
I’m going to do my best to give some highlights to other features implemented in the game so that other team members can get their spotlight, too. First, Dylan put together a translation interface that reads in a spreadsheet like the one below:
And turns it into texts that changes based on the player’s language settings. Since we’re early in development, there haven’t been any translations outside of Pig Latin. Still, when we do finalize every texts in the game, we should be able to translate the game to other languages very quickly.
Here’s to hoping the next update will come quickly (without E3 bothering us).
Now that we have the menus finished and cleaned up to a glorious degree, we’re quickly shifting to the minigames in Not a Clone next. We have a few brainstorming sketches put together as you can see below, courtesy of the wonderfully talented Astra Wijaya:
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We’re also working on a few bug fixes to make the game more stable. If things works as planned, we should be able to put together a preview version for testing very soon!
Apologize for the lack of Not a Clone update. Ludum Dare‘s judging period has completely overwhelmed us, but now that it’s over, we can talk about what’s going on right now. On top of a trailer we posted earlier (see below)…
We also have a clip of it working on a mobile device. The trailer below is played on an Android, but we’re developing the iPhone version of it at the same time:
This is the trailer we submitted to the Boston Festival of Indie Games (FIG) and BitSummit, to make it clear the game is pretty far into development. Hopefully it gives the same impression to you as well.
The next Ludum Dare isn’t until August, so we better get back to high gear, and bring this game to a finish!
Hey guys. We were without an update last week, but we’ve got some major things to show off today! Namely, we’ve got a trailer showing off the new menus.
Now, granted, the minigame graphics are still the same, but we do plan on changing them up very soon. To stick with the mobile app market satire, we’ll try to make it look like most of them are made by different people. As such, different art and music styles will be used.
We were stuck with Ludum Dare 32 last weekend (have you tried Star Driller Ultra or Unconventional Stick Swinging Simulator yet?), but we did make some major improvements to the user interface (UI) on Not a Clone. The instructions, success, fail, time’s up, and speed up labels has been greatly improved.
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Additionally, the Game Over screen has been revamped as well.
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There’s a bit more work left that can be seen in the screenshots and animations above, but we’re definitely making major progress.
So a lot of praises has been made about the graphics in Star Driller Ultra. How did we make such beautiful graphics in a short amount of time?
Well, actually, it’s a lot easier than you think.
Part 1: Making the model in Blender
First, open Blender.
Easy enough…
Next, click on “File” on the menu bar, then “User Preference.” Tap the “Input” tab, and change the “Select With:” from the dreaded default Right to the far more sensible Left. Finally, click “Save User Settings.”
You will thank me later.
Uhh…where were we? Oh, yes: make a shape.
Way ahead of you. See? A cube!
Select that shape with the left mouse button, then go to the right pane and click on the gear tab (called Modifier).
Modifier selected
Click on “Add Modifier”, and select “Wireframe.”
And this is where the magic is about to start!
Now your shape is a wireframe!
It doesn’t look that nice, though.
After that, it’s just a matter of adjusting the thickness value on the modifier.
That’s more like it!
Now you can save this model in your Unity project’s Assets folder, and let the game engine do the rest.
Part 2: Toon shading in Unity
Next, we need to import some toon shaders in Unity. Open Unity, then click on “Assets” under the menu bar, and select “Import Package -> Effects.”
It’s a poorly-worded location to put toon shaders into.
Open the Unity project, and drag your new model into the Scene.
Wait a minute…that’s not toon shading!
On the Inspector panel, there’s the Material component properties displayed on the bottom. Scroll down there, and change it’s shader to “Toon -> Lit”
Ooooh! So many shaders!
The cube will still look a bit ugly because it doesn’t have a ramp set. Change the ramp to a horizontal monochrome gradient that’s 2 pixel tall, and 256 pixels wide. This will act as the gradient applied to the object in response to the lighting.
After that, just change the Main Color on the material to whatever you want it to be.
Let’s make it unoffensive green.
Part 3: Image effects (bloom!)
But wait! If you switch from Scene pane to Game pane, you’ll notice the graphics isn’t as awesome as Star Driller Ultra.
Not awesome enough.
That’s because we’re missing some image effects; specifically, bloom. Fortunately, we’ve already imported it, remember?
Again, poorly worded.
Click on your camera, and in the inspector pane, use Add Component to add the following three image effects, in order.
Image Effects -> Camera -> Vignette and Chromatic Aberration
(Adds darker, blurry parts at the corner of the screen)
Image Effects -> Bloom and Glow -> BloomAndFlares
(Adds blooming light effect)
Image Effects -> Other -> Antialiasing
(Soften shapes with jaggy edges)
Furthermore, for Star Driller Ultra, We’ve adjusted the values in each of these image effects under the inspector as follows:
Lots of numbers.
And that’s about it. You can see the results for yourself.
A true work of art.
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