Not a Clone

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.

Upcoming changes to Not a Clone

| Taro Omiya

Hello, everyone. We don’t have any graphical updates this week, but we are making some progress on developing Not a Clone. Namely on the feedback we’ve received during regular playtesting. Basically, we’ve listened to criticisms that our game, both in its current form and the original PC version, are difficult to get into due to the minigames’ complexity. Additionally, a few pointed out that the satire behind the game wasn’t very obvious or critical. Our team has been hard at work coming up with a design to resolve both issues, and we’ve finally resolved on our answer.

We’ll be making a (fictional) app store to unlock more minigames.

Our plan is to start with a limited number of minigames which would be easier for beginners to play. Most of these will be original games. You’ll earn currency depending on your score at the end of the game, allowing you to buy games from the app store. Except…most of them are clones!

As of now, we’re still in designing phases, so it’ll seem like there’s no progress being made for a while. Rest assured we’re working as hard as possible!

Not a Clone August updates!

| Taro Omiya

Howdy, all! We’re back from an exhausting and frantic August with some awesome updates to graphics and minigames. Some major progress has been made!

First, Astra Wijaya improved Flappy Bee into Flappy Sombrero:

FlappySombreroBig

He also improve Into The Cup into…Into The Cup:

IntoTheCupBig

Taro Omiya, meanwhile, put together a couple of new minigames! Let’s see if you can figure out how to play the game:

Mystery Minigame 1
Mystery Minigame 1
Mystery Minigame 2
Mystery Minigame 2
Mystery Minigame 3
Mystery Minigame 3
Mystery Minigame 4
Mystery Minigame 4

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!)

More graphics updates in Not a Clone

| Taro Omiya

Today we have not two, but three minigame graphics updates. All courtesy of Astra Wijaya.

First, Super Polygon has been updated to look more fancy:

HexagonBig1

Similarly, Disco Hexagon, which is now renamed to Power Hexagon, uses a power motif:

HexagonBig2

Lastly, Dark Tiles is now Dark Tiles. Confused? We’ll let the animation to the job:

LightTilesBig1

Unfortunately, we’re a bit short on time to provide more updates. Hopefully we’ll have more in store next week.

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.

Sound Effect Updates in Not a Clone

| Taro Omiya

This week’s Dev Log update on Not a Clone isn’t graphical, but rather, auditory. Specifically, this week’s update is on the sound effects that plays within the game’s menus. The video below demonstrates the changes made to the auditory experience of the game (background music* has yet to change, though).

Full credit goes to Chase Bethea for putting together these sounds so quickly.

One other fine-tuning worth mentioning: we’ve made Disco Hexagon and other similar minigames easier to play by making the controls and obstacle placement more obvious to the player:

Disco Hexagon5

In comparison, here’s a screenshot to the older, more cryptic game, which immediately had the walls converge into the middle at the start of the game:

Game10

We hope this change provides a much more pleasant experience to the player.

* All music created by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
“Ouroboros“, “Local Forecast“, “Hidden Agenda“, “Winner Winner!“, “Beachfront Celebration“, “George Street Shuffle“, and “Carefree” are
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/