Not a Clone

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!

Phone Clicker4

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!

First 2 days of MAGFest 2016

| Taro Omiya

The first 2 days of MAGFest 2016 can be summarized with just one word: wow! Thanks for all those who came to our booth and played our game, Not a Clone. The response has been absolutely amazing. Plus, even Wario approved!

We’re still parsing through the feedback we’ve received, but it looks like we’re still on-schedule for that Spring release! There hasn’t been any bad bugs during everyone’s play-session, so things are only going to get better here.

MAGFest (6)

We have a MAGFest booth!

| Taro Omiya

That’s right, we have a booth for MAGFest Indie Videogame Show (MIVS) at the National Harbor! This is an exciting milestone to us, and we definitely hope to see you there!

For this week’s Not a Clone update, we finally finished Challenge Mode we’ve been talking about last week:

As detailed earlier, Challenge Mode is a mode that occurs after reaching a certain score. For one game, you’ll have to play through its 3 difficulty levels back-to-back within 10 seconds. The reward for succeeding in this minigame is either a score increase of 4 points, or gaining back one life. Failing results in…nothing, actually. You just lose the opportunity get the score boost or life up. Consider it a freebie!

Incidentally, Inverted Mode can stack on top of Challenge Mode, giving a small chance of making the challenge a lot easier:

New feature: Inverted Objectives!

| Taro Omiya

After a messy game jam and the relaxing holidays, we’re back and working hard to make Not a Clone the best mobile game about mobile games. There has been a lot of tweaks since the last update, so let’s list a couple. First and most notable is inverted objectives: in certain games, the objectives will occasionally change to something else, usually the opposite of the usual instructions. For example, here’s what normally happens to Flappy Sombrero when the sombrero hits a cactus:

ObjectiveNormal1

With inverted objectives, however, the instructions changes. Instead of flying between the cactus, the sombrero is supposed to fly into it. To make the difference more clearer, we’ve also inverted the colors of the objectives, making it easier to recognize when the objectives has changed.

ObjectiveInverted2

We’re still in the middle of working on this new mode, so stay tuned!

Speaking of staying in tune, last update, we’ve mentioned that Challenge mode was being implemented, and that certain details may change. One significant change is that you no longer lose a life if you fail the Challenge. As a consequence of this, we’re planning on making Challenge games a lot harder.

There’s also a few updates we’ve made to the opening of the game. First, the loading screen now shows different quips each time you open the game. Second, the number of icons that appears within the first few frames of opening the game now reflects the number of games you have unlocked. For example, the first time you play the game, you have 15 icons visible on the screen:

StartScreenApps

Lastly, the start screen now has a rolling label below the start button. It changes every couple of seconds to display a new information:

StartScreenRollingText

Lastly, we’re going to leave with a mystery concept art our artist put together. Can you guess what it could be?

Bicyclabult

The post Ludum Dare update (and minor updates to Not a Clone)

| Taro Omiya

Last weekend, we took a stab at creating an online multiplayer shooter for the Ludum Dare game jam. If you haven’t seen it already, it’s a fun 2-player experiment where each player can hack the controls of the other player, disabling up to two buttons. Since the original release had a lot of technical problems, we’ve created a post-jam release that improves on the following:

  1. Explosions and sparks will not sync their positional data to the server more than once.
  2. Increasing how often the player and bullet syncs their data.
  3. Made the opposing player’s animations to be much more reactive.
  4. Changed the health meter graphics.
  5. Vastly increased the range of the radar.
  6. Player avatar now appears as arrows in the radar.
  7. Added a laser to indicate the path the bullet will follow.
  8. Prevented disabling more than one directional key
  9. Shields (called “Reflect”) can now be disabled. The programmer actually forgot to enable this button, and was meant to always be hackable.
  10. Made the player avatars and their colliders much larger.

Hopefully these simple changes will improve the playability of the game.

In the meantime, there’s only a few minor updates with Not a Clone: basically our entire team are enjoying their holidays. There is, however, one new feature in works. Called “inverted mode,” the instructions of a couple of minigames may randomly change to something opposite of the originally intended instruction. For example, in a Totemman minigame, the instructions will change from “Slap!” to “Die!” As one would expect, the intended solution to this minigame would be to figure out how to kill your poor character within the time limit. Obviously, there will be a lot of setup necessary for this new mode, such as keeping track of how many times the player won the minigame before allowing inverted mode, or providing a visual indicator for more experienced players. More updates will be coming in the near-future about this neat feature.

Happy holidays to everyone!

Reminder: Ludum Dare 34 is this weekend!

| Taro Omiya

A reminder that we’ll be attending the Ludum Dare 34 this weekend, and won’t have any updates to Not a Clone. In fact, we’ll be hosting at the physical location in Tech Valley Game Space! If you happen to be around nearby, just RSVP in the meetup below, and join us this weekend in a fun 72-hour online game jam!

Happy Jamming!

Ludum Dare 34

Friday, Dec 11, 2015, 7:30 PM

Tech Valley Game Space
30 Third Street Troy, NY

6 Space Cadets Went

https://youtu.be/XVrgCgtKobIThe time has come…to make games for the 34th tri-annual online game jam, Ludum Dare!No experience in making games necessary!  This is just a fun challenge for all of us, and often serves as an educational moment to learn how to work with deadlines.  We will be going through game idea brainstorming and team building e…

Check out this Meetup →

New feature: Challenge!

| Taro Omiya

We’re adding a new feature to Not a Clone this week! Courtesy of programmer, Taro Omiya, Challenge is a new mode that occurs every 10 apps. For one single app, the difficulty dramatically increases:

ChallengeLifeUp2

The reward, as the animation above implies, is replenishing one life!

LifeUp2

But what if you already have all 4 lives? No worries! In fact, life up is just one of the rewards. The other, which occurs much more often if you have more lives, is increasing the score by a drastic amount (4!).

ChallengeScoreUp

Naturally, succeeding in this app leads to increasing your score dramatically.

ScoreUp2

So what happens if you lose to challenge mode? Simple: you lose one life, just like the other apps, and lose the opportunity to take the challenge again for 10 more games. Of course, we’ll be play-testing this feature extensively, so a lot of these details are subject to change.

The Joyride updates!

| Taro Omiya

Last time, we hinted that Astra Wijaya had some new updates to show off. This week, we’ve got some GIFs to cover those updates!

CerealJoyride

JetbootsJoyride2

In other news, we were hard at work submitting to the MAGFest Indie Video Game Showcase these few weeks, so if it sounded like we disappeared again, it’s actually due to tight deadlines and upcoming holidays that’s been breaking up our update schedule. Still, we can say with confidence that since our commitment to simplify and lengthen the game, Not a Clone has been drastically improving. While playtesting from a few months ago resulted in a lot of confusion, our local demonstration this month at the Rensselaer Game Showcase and TVGS’ monthly Interactive Showcase were exceedingly positive. We still have a lot of work left to do, but we can assure with the latest feedback that the game will be much more fun than the original prototype!