Universal Not a Clone: a satire on the mobile game market

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Howdy, all. We're Omiya Games, a small studio working on Not a Clone, an app store parody where you play all the games! Not a Clone is a Wario Ware Inc.-style minigame series where you play a lot of mobile games in quick successions. The original game was developed for the PC, but it was popular enough to warrant a mobile release.

Edit: Not a Clone is released!!! You can grab it on AppStore (iPhone and iPads) and Google Play (Androids) right now:

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Here's the game's description:

Check out our free demo on GameJolt, Itch.io, & SlideDB

Our Blog


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[Cross-posted from Omiya Games]

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)
• Astra Wijaya, naturally, as the artist
• Chase Bethea as the sound designer
• 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:



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).

 

Thanks for the follow! Yeah, we were really surprised by the popularity of the original PC version, with so many let's plays like the one below (warning: strong language). It only seemed appropriate to make it bigger and better!

 

[Reposted from Omiya Games]

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:



As you clear more minigames, the number of fruits will keep increasing:



Until it fills up the whole screen:



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.

 

Yup, the minigames rolls in, non-stop (until you lose all battery life, of course).

 

Not a Clone minigame mockups and fun facts

[Reposted from Omiya Games]

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:



Note that neither texts are final.

 

In regards to suggesting ideas, feel free to post them here. We're definitely listening.

As for a list of what we're cloning, well, that's something we'd like to keep a secret...for multiple reasons.

Thanks for the follow, G-Wall!

 

[Reposted from Omiya Games]

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).

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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:



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:



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

 

Thanks for the support! We're hard at work on finishing this game, but we're definitely still in the early stages of development. So we ask for some patience: this project still has a long way to go.

 

Darumaman and Totemman in Not a Clone

[Cross-posted from Omiya Games]

We return to our regular program of Not a Clone updates with two animations: Darumaman and Totemman minigames!



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:



Likewise, Colors! and Neons! got a similar treatment.



We’ll provide more updates as we go along on how other minigames changes as the difficulty increases.

 

More graphics updates in Not a Clone

[Cross-posted from Omiya Games]

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:



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



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



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

 

New Not a Clone graphics and minigames

[Cross-posted from Omiya Games]

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:



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 2

 

August Update Bonanza

[Cross-posted from Omiya Games]

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:



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



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

 

Upcoming changes to Not a Clone

Forgot to post this last week, so forgive me.

[Cross-posted from Omiya Games]

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!

 

Hooray for programmer's art!

[Cross-posted from Omiya Games]

Due to the artist's brief vacation and the programmer currently sick, as well as a brief break to join the Local History Game Jam last weekend, progress on Not a Clone is a bit slow. Despite his sickness, though, our programmer went ahead and tried to put together some changes together. Excuse the terrible artwork and composition.

First off the Game Over screen has been simplified to combine the quips, list of clones, and original minigames into a single results panel. Leaderboards still remains as a separate panel that can be revealed by swiping. We hope this reduces any confusions in the game. Also visible as a brief preview is a hint button to reveal more information on each minigame.



The proposed shop to buy and unlock minigames is being implemented as well. Currently, it'll look like this:



Hopefully with more development, we can go into more detail with this new menu.