Many apologize for the super-late update. We’ve had a lot of events occur between updates, including a move to the new office!
The New Office!
But that doesn’t mean we didn’t make any progress. First is a new trailer that includes our updated menus:
Naturally, the new Top Charts is the highlight for this trailer. Next up, the Game Over has a new two-page look to it. We’re still developing the screen, but here’s a brief preview:
Score ScreenPlayed Games List Screen
Lastly, Astra Wijaya is at it again with a new concept art for a minigame. Can you guess which one?
The Top Charts menu allows one to unlock minigames via in-game currency.
Games menu displays what’s been unlocked.
Selecting a minigame in the Games menu and Top Charts brings up this dialog, the Details menu. New to this update is Practice Mode, a mode that lets you practice a specific minigame. There’s no scores or penalties recorded during Practice Mode, so it should provide a safe environment to learn and improve on approaching a tough minigame.
Also, excuse the typo on the description and instructions on the game. It’s obviously a work-in-progress.
Lastly, the list of options. Again, all the settings displayed above aren’t final.
After a long brainstorming discussions, we’re ready to get started on creating the menus for the minigame store, minigame list, and options. Many thanks to Astra Wijaya for putting these clean mock-ups together! To start with, the mockup below has two menus shown: the left menu is the minigame store listing the available options. Unlocking a minigame is as easy as tapping the buy button, which lists the price of the minigame. If one wants to know about more details on each entry, they can tap on the icon or name of the minigame to open the left, which provides the description of the game as well as how to play it:
Also new is a menu devoted to listing all the minigames you’ve unlocked so far. By tapping on the info icon, not only will the description of the game be displayed, but also how to play the game, what the game is a clone of (if any), and even a button that lets the player practice the minigame safely.
Lastly, the options menu. This mockup below is, admittedly, a bit incomplete as we’re still discussing what features we have left to add in the game. Regardless, a few settings were important enough to make it to this mockup, including audio configuration, changing language, displaying the leaderboard and achievements, credits, and so forth.
We should have more to show in the future as implement these mockups in the game.
We return to our regular program of Not a Clone updates with two animations: Darumaman and Totemman minigames!
These will take place of Fungusman and Slapperman from the old Not a Clone build. Thanks again to Astra Wijaya for the graphical improvements.
A while ago, we mentioned we were adding difficulty levels to each minigame. Here are a few more changes that can occur on each minigame.
The minigames 2 and 10 now increases the number of tiles the game starts with as the difficulty increases. It was a bit difficult for our programmer, Taro Omiya to put together, but we’ve managed to make all the puzzles the minigame generates to be solvable:
Likewise, Colors! and Neons! got a similar treatment.
We’ll provide more updates as we go along on how other minigames changes as the difficulty increases.
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:
This slideshow requires JavaScript.
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!
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