Clones

New Not a Clone graphics and minigames

| Taro Omiya

Hello, everyone! This month, we’ll be in a bit of a hiatus because we will be volunteering on teaching kids how to make games throughout this summer. We should be back in normal schedule starting September.

Fortunately, we do have some updates this week! The first is the usual Astra Wijaya graphic updates, this time on Flappy Fly into Flappy Comic:

FlappyComicBig

Much more cooler, however, is that we’re now creating new minigames as well! So far, we have two previews. Let’s see if you can guess how they play:

Mystery minigame 1
Mystery minigame 1
Mystery Minigame 2
Mystery Minigame 2

(Don’t look at the tags! That’s cheating!)

Darumaman and Totemman in Not a Clone

| Taro Omiya

We return to our regular program of Not a Clone updates with two animations: Darumaman and Totemman minigames!

darumamanBigtotemmanBig2

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:

VIIIeasyVIIImediumVIIIhard

Likewise, Colors! and Neons! got a similar treatment.

ColorsEasyColorsMediumColorsHard

We’ll provide more updates as we go along on how other minigames changes as the difficulty increases.

Not a Clone minigame mockups and fun facts

| Taro Omiya

Continuing our updates on Not a Clone’s progress, we’ve got a new mockup for a minigame:

TotemBG-SS

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:

Loading

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:

GameOver

Note that neither texts are final.

Not a Clone Update: a new Game Over screen

| Taro Omiya

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:

NotACloneScreenshotSaturday3-3NotACloneScreenshotSaturday3-4

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:

NotACloneScreenshotSaturday4-1NotACloneScreenshotSaturday4-2NotACloneScreenshotSaturday4-3NotACloneScreenshotSaturday4-4

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
Easy Mode

As you clear more minigames, the number of fruits will keep increasing:

Medium Mode
Medium Mode

Until it fills up the whole screen:

Hard Mode
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.