Update

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.

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.

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.

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).

Not a Clone May 2015 Gameplay Trailer (Work-in-progress)

| Taro Omiya

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!

Happy Holidays!

| Taro Omiya

Happy holidays from the entire Omiya Games team! We’ve made a few changes to the homepage that we hope you’ll like.

  1. We got rid of the annoying Patreon slider, and replaced it with the much less annoying button on the sidebar
  2. Slightly re-organized the sidebar
  3. Brought back the side bar in the Games and Contact Us page
  4. We didn’t mention this earlier, but we replaced the weird image gallery in Games to Itch.io widgets
  5. Added links to web portals under the Games menu item under the header
  6. Moved the Press-Kit link under Contact Us menu item under the header.