NYAF

The biggest small game I ever did. Started as an idea of a very small game fully procedural, with some parodic elements (fake ads) to advertise non-Freemium apps (Not Yet Another Freemium->NYAF), adhering to the concept of Ethical Game: a commercial app that exposes a clear price, and will not ask the customer to pay anything else to play the full game.

(Piggy Bank by Sébastien Lesage, as all graphics elements in NYAF)

And then I realized that the idea (hidden symbols on a calculated background) would work marvel on my Artist friend Sébastien Lesage's "Génèse et Chaos" canvas that you can physically buy there.

Most of the backgrounds used in Nyaf are scanned physical canvas. The originals are absolutely stunning and some glow in the dark, thus the light green colour (from page 4, with most on page 5).

We discussed placing the characters randomly or not (like Where's Wally?), and ended up using mostly random placement of small characters with one mode with manually placed characters. During our playtests, the random placement gave us plenty of wonderful surprises, one character being mixed with another in the background, one nearly hidden by the surrounding...

But if NYAF is a success you can expect more canvas, more characters, and more non-Random placements.

And more was added, some secrets, then some more content linked to these secrets, and "things" that get unlocked by playing... To finally be much bigger than expected, 100 of C# scripts, several hundreds of sounds and graphics elements... A little big game (with a silly name).

The music is the result of buying Royalty-Free Music, mostly from Groupees. This last started as a normal Game Bundle and evolved into offering all kind of media, including a lot of good music. And I have been really impressed by these Royalty-Free bundles.

And with the help of my wife, I listened to all pieces (~100) to find the best suited to each canvas (and mini-games ;) ). And I am again very happy with the result.

The fonts are all by Gluk ( http://www.glukfonts.pl/ ), and there are many more from him that are great (and free for any use, the non-free ones are superb too).

Mini-games, Aaah. Well, that's a secret. But... I hope you will like them ;)

This game was also the occasion to go back doing videos, and I worked also quite hard on scripting them (aside from the Puppets ones, which are long half-improvised rushes for small cuts later on) and on doing them as well as possible. They have been edited with Vegas Movie Studio Platinium Suite 16, an update from version 12 I had before. I had fun doing them and hope you will like them as well and find them funny. Maybe it will convince some person to buy Nyaf too ;)

Pricing... So back to being an ethical game. The price is decided on what is common on the Play Store, and what I believe is quite a low price for the amount of content you get. Nyaf if the result of ~6 months full-time work, with plenty more in my spare time before, as it is based on another game I did with Unity before. So 4€ it is, on which Google adds different taxes in different countries (countries' rules, not Google fault). For less than a lunch price (in most countries), you can play Nyaf for as long as you want, and get the full game!

Secrets... Hmmm. Let say there are some. If you find any, feel free to contact me or comment here. And feel free to share!

Youtube and other sharing platforms: feel free to record and share as you want! Of course, I am happy if you provide a link to the game :)

Bug and other issues: please contact me, I will work on any reported issue/bug. Depending on my situation it might take some time (remember I am alone on that), but I won't ignore anything.

Paper-Save: Am I crazy??? Well maybe. The truth is that all cloud saves solutions expose you to other companies (i.e. they can track you a little bit more) and none are truly cross-platform. Codes that you can copy/past, keep in a text file, send by email, are truly yours, and fully cross-platforms. I hope NYAF will come to Steam and consoles, in a DX version (better quality music, less compressed textures...), and your saves from Android will still work. BTW iOS versions will depend on somebody porting the game, I cannot do that myself. Linux and Mac versions will come with the PC version :)

Finally, Nyaf is a handcrafted work that I did with dedication, attention and love, and I really hope you have plenty of fun with it. I worked hard on the quality of it, fixing all bugs I found. There are probably some left, aside from some issues (one of the mini-game desperately needs to be fast, so sometimes one unit can be stuck. But pause the game, erase your unit and place them correctly and all will be well again. It is much rarer now as I added a simple but efficient solution :) ), but there shouldn't be any serious bugs left. If you encounter anything serious, lost your progress or anything like that, once again just contact me and I will work on it. I won't let you down.