Continuing our updates on Not a Clone’s progress, we’ve got a new mockup for a minigame:
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:
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:
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:
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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!
Apologize for the lack of Not a Clone update. Ludum Dare‘s judging period has completely overwhelmed us, but now that it’s over, we can talk about what’s going on right now. On top of a trailer we posted earlier (see below)…
We also have a clip of it working on a mobile device. The trailer below is played on an Android, but we’re developing the iPhone version of it at the same time:
This is the trailer we submitted to the Boston Festival of Indie Games (FIG) and BitSummit, to make it clear the game is pretty far into development. Hopefully it gives the same impression to you as well.
The next Ludum Dare isn’t until August, so we better get back to high gear, and bring this game to a finish!
Hey guys. We were without an update last week, but we’ve got some major things to show off today! Namely, we’ve got a trailer showing off the new menus.
Now, granted, the minigame graphics are still the same, but we do plan on changing them up very soon. To stick with the mobile app market satire, we’ll try to make it look like most of them are made by different people. As such, different art and music styles will be used.
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.
Thanks to Astra, the title screen for Not a Clone now looks a lot better:
In other news, we’ve been adding multi-touch for a few more minigames, and updating the rest of the menus to bring it closer to the mockups posted previously.
There’s not much to report this week, largely because a huge amount of time has been spent stripping out the previous menus, and implementing a new one to better reflect last week’s mockup. For example, to change the old start screen…
Initial conversion to iPad screen resolution
…to the new one Astra Wijaya made…
Mockup of the Start Menu
…GameObjects (this project is made in Unity) has to be moved around to make it easier to animate and script the UI.
This is actually a lot of invisible work. As weird as it sounds, there’s quite a lot that goes behind the scenes to update old stuff to look like something new.
Still, things are progressing smoothly. In other places, a few minigames now support multi-touch, making them a bit easier.
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