Taro Omiya

Adding story to Not a Clone

| Taro Omiya

Apologize for the lack of updates for a few weeks. Many of us are recovering from the exhausting trip at the Game Developers Conference (GDC), so this week’s update is a small work-in-progress idea we’ve been bouncing around. Born from our writer, Robert Denner, the loading screen has been updated to look like a messenger application, where your friend introduces you to Not a Clone store.  Here’s a rough sketch below:

NewLoadingScreen

Obviously, we have a lot of work to do on improving this screen, but it does mean we now have a progressing story in our game. In other news, Taro Omiya has been working hard on integrating leaderboards into the game, while Astra Wijaya and Chase Bethea has been adding new assets into the game. We may start a Twitch stream soon in regards to our development process, now that we think of it…

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!

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

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 update: Improving graphics in Not Angry Things

| Taro Omiya

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:

prototypeLichtenstein08Game07

Now they look like this:

angryMonkeysangryThieves

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:

  1. Myself, Taro Omiya, as the game designer and programmer (and the creator of the original game)
  2. Astra Wijaya, naturally, as the artist
  3. Chase Bethea as the sound designer
  4. and lastly, Dylan Bramblett as programmer.

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:

TranslationSpreadsheet

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).