Animation

Changes made for Not a Clone iOS approval

| Taro Omiya

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:

startscreen4

Shop

In response, we’ve made the following changes:

  1. Skip the starting animation, and jump right to the end of it.
  2. Make all the icons squares.

As such, the two new screens looks like as follows:

approvedstartscreen3

approvedtopapps

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:

disclaimer

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 update: notifications

| Taro Omiya

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:

notification

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.

Screen_Shot_2016-06-23_at_17.59.06_
Screen_Shot_2016-06-23_at_17.59.30_

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.

Greatly Improved Not a Clone label UIs

| Taro Omiya

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.

Not a Clone Progress: Menu Animations

| Taro Omiya

There’s not much to report this week, largely because a huge amount of time has been spent stripping out the previous menus, and implementing a new one to better reflect last week’s mockup. For example, to change the old start screen…

Initial conversion to iPad screen resolution
Initial conversion to iPad screen resolution

…to the new one Astra Wijaya made…

Mockup of the Start Menu
Mockup of the Start Menu

…GameObjects (this project is made in Unity) has to be moved around to make it easier to animate and script the UI.

StartScreenStartScreenImproved

This is actually a lot of invisible work. As weird as it sounds, there’s quite a lot that goes behind the scenes to update old stuff to look like something new.

Still, things are progressing smoothly. In other places, a few minigames now support multi-touch, making them a bit easier.