Astra Wijaya

Not a Clone Update: New Trailer & Release Estimate

| Taro Omiya

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!

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Again, there are no changes to the demo build yet. We will be working on updating it, though!

Not a Clone Update: New Icon

| Taro Omiya

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:

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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:

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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.

Not a Clone update: Prepping for Private Beta!

| Taro Omiya

Happy Fourth of July weekend! This week, we’ve been gearing up to send out a private beta build next week. As many of you may know, beta testing is a simple quality assurance measure to make sure bugs are fixed, and the game’s economy is balanced well. Unfortunately, due to the rampant cloning (heh) and piracy in certain app stores, we’ll be keeping this build internal.

In the meantime, here are some development updates! As noted earlier, we are now focusing on polishes. Last Tuesday, Taro Omiya modified the behavior of two games, Phone Clicker and Angry Monkeys. Here’s what Phone Clicker looked like before the change:

Phone Clicker4

And here’s what it looks like after the change. Notice any difference?

newPhoneClicker

That’s right: we’ve replaced the number of taps made on Phone Clicker to a bunch of fingerprints. It’s a small, but noticeable way to create distinctions between microgames that are functionally similar to each other.

The changes made to Angry Monkeys, on the other hand, are more subtle. Here’s the before:

Angry Monkeys

And here’s the after. Notice some changes made to the physics:

newAngryMonkeys

We’ve set the monkeys and the slingshot to not collide with each other. Furthermore, when the monkey is flung into the air, its trajectory will not be in the mercy of the string behavior, but rather, the position you’ve let go of the slingshot. Overall, this should make the game more predictable and easier to play.

Last but not least: Astra Wijaya has update the upgrade graphics to look cleaner, as demonstrated in the game list screenshot below:

newUpgrades

As usual, we’ll be continuing our weekly Twitch live-stream next Tuesday, 3:00 PM EDT at twitch.tv/japtar10101. If you missed the last one, where we’ve made the changes described above, you can check it out in the Youtube video below. See you next time!

Not a Clone Update: Ridiculous Rockets

| Taro Omiya

We have a short Not a Clone update this week. We finished integrating Astra Wijaya’s artwork for Ridiculous Rockets last Tuesday (May 10th, 3:00 PM EDT) in our weekly live-stream:

Ridiculous Rockets 1

As always, our stream’s highlight is available here: twitch.tv/japtar10101/v/65721074.

Next Tuesday’s 3:00 PM EDT stream (at twitch.tv/japtar10101) will cover the last microgame that needs art integration before release! The rest of the stream will focus on adding the last few left-over features in the game.

The Not a Clone Update to Unlock All Secrets

| Taro Omiya

Our weekly live-stream continued last Tuesday (April 26th, 3:00 PM EDT) with a completion of Unlock, the handy puzzle micro-game about moving a key out of its keyhole. The end result? We’ve successfully integrated Astra Wijaya’s artwork to a thrilling tale of thievery:

unlock

For those interested, our stream’s highlight is available here: twitch.tv/japtar10101/v/63164094. This still leaves one more sketch from last week’s Not a Clone post, which will be the highlight of this Tuesday’s 3:00 PM EDT stream (twitch.tv/japtar10101). That said, we still have more new sketches!

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More mysterious microgame sketches approaches!

| Taro Omiya

Last post, we’ve mentioned we would stream last Tuesday at 3:00 PM EST. Unfortunately, due to a schedule conflict, were we not able to stream that day (we did stream ourselves playing Ludum Dare 35 games, though). On the plus side, we did release a new game during the game jam!

We will be busy handling Ludum Dare-related business for the next two weeks, but we do have a few updates on Not a Clone. As usual, Astra Wijaya put together a few sketches for the next set of microgames we’ll be working on:

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What will these microgames be? Tune in next week to find out!

Edit: Oh, whoops, we forgot to mention that Pushing Buttons is now done:

pushingButtons

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.

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!

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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!