GUI

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.

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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.

Not a Clone Update: Tutorial

| Taro Omiya

Apologize for the lack of update last week. Our regular poster here, Taro Omiya, was sick last weekend. But now he’s doing a lot better!

Our latest Not a Clone updates are general User Interface (UI) polishes, in preparation for the looming release. As those who played our free demo will recognize, we have a rather unusual loading screen that provides messages to the player. We’ve polished this to look more like a text message application it was intended to look like. Both our artist, Astra Wijaya, and writer, Robert Denner (a past collaborator on Letters From Secret Santa, and the person who came up with the text messaging idea), are hard at work putting finishing touches to this unique story-telling medium.

newLoadingScreen

Also debuted with the free demo are the music! The ever-so-talented composer, Spencer Bambrick, has put together some great music for this game, including the calming menu theme below. Check it out!

Finally, Taro Omiya has been putting together some extra polishes to the game over screen, including a short tutorial on how to navigate the shop menu.

tutorial2

We’ll be continuing our weekly Twitch live-stream next Tuesday, 3:00 PM EDT at twitch.tv/japtar10101. Our plan is to add new purchasable upgrades to the game! If you missed the last one, where we constructed the new text message loading screen, you can check it out in the Youtube video below.

New trailer, game over screen redux, and more!

| Taro Omiya

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!
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 Screen
Score Screen
Played Games List Screen
Played Games List Screen

Lastly, Astra Wijaya is at it again with a new concept art for a minigame. Can you guess which one?

NotACloneScreenshotSaturday6-3

Menu updates and new practice mode

| Taro Omiya

We’ve finally implemented the menu mock-ups posted two weeks ago into the game! Here’s the not-quite-final screenshots of each menu:

TopCharts

The Top Charts menu allows one to unlock minigames via in-game currency.

GamesList

Games menu displays what’s been unlocked.

GameDetails

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.

Options

Lastly, the list of options. Again, all the settings displayed above aren’t final.

New mockups for store, games list, and options

| Taro Omiya

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:

Mockup Top Charts

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.

Mockup Games

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.

Mockup Options

We should have more to show in the future as implement these mockups in the game.

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.

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.