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.

NYAF - Privacy Policy

We do not collect any information of any kind ourselves. We only want our customers to enjoy the game and have fun.
There is no login or ads.

NYAF is written using Unity. Unity does a minimum collection of the user's hardware information and offers optional advanced analytics, that we do not use.
Please consult Unity's Privacy Policy for more details.
As of the time of writing, the 17th April 2020, it is summarised in "1. Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)", "I play a game built with Unity software, what should I know?", 1st paragraph only:

"Some Unity developers use Unity’s Analytics and Ad services" -> We don't
"Some Unity developers may collect your information independent of Unity." -> We also don't.


And more details can be found in "3. Information We Collect (Depending on the Product or Service)", "Information that is passively collected by Unity (often automatically), including:", under the topic "User device information: When you play a game built with Unity Software, Unity may collect some or all of the following information when you use the game:". Their usage is detailed in the next part, "4. How We Use the Information We Collect or Receive".

Aside from the minimum collection from Unity, we do not use any tracking/collection API or code. We also do not have access to the data collected by Unity about your usage of NYAF.

One page back from the past :). Please ask me if you want the binaries!
A (future) tutorial to use Ogre, OgreNewt&Newton and OpenAL. Piston trows a "piston" in the air, pushing a small projectile. This one separate if high enough, and spawns 30 other projectiles after 10 secondes. Each of these projectiles explodes (or implodes) each 2 secondes, with the corresponding effect:

It allows to illustrate several different mechanisms, and, if it looks impressive, is very simple. It includes:
- user force & torque callbacks for a lot of interactions (throwing the piston, the explosions, the particule effects, the sound effects),
- a collision callback to play sound and render some particules (but should evolve),
- the use of dotScene to have different levels (only three simple as example, but the mechanism is complete),
- a score system (with load and save in XML, keeping the highest speed of one projectile),
- OpenAL for localised sound using the evolved wiki sound manager (though it gives the last remaining leaks :( ),
- a pause (for the physics now, not for the particules),
- a title page,
- some overlays and bitmaps :) ("starting" frames, lives... ),
- basic use of raycast (to push some objects on the ground), it is the simpler use of raycast I know, might be a beginner version of the great ONewt raycast example.

Limitations and things to be done:
- cut it in small parts and explain it :),
- use the treeCollision serialiser instead of my adapted dotScene loader,
- clean my C-like classes (clean in a C way, not in a C++ one :( ),
- clean my use of Ogre (I might use some strange way to do things, like my delScene, not sure it is not too much (still it works),
- change the gfx and the sound !!! (mostly the sounds)
- limit the creation of buildings (because it crashes Newton now quite easily) linked to the total number of cube in the scene,
- use the collision callback to destruct object (so we show the classical shoot-em up use of collision). I might do it later (quite easy to do, I just need more time).
- change the input (mostly for the score text, it is crappy as hell :) ).

How to play it:

The first time, you can just wait, the piston will be pushed after 30 secondes, and then everything will happen automatically. When you want to finish, press F4, it will consume one life :) . You have four "trials" per scene, and three scenes. But you can interact too:

To move the camera: mouse and arrows, PgUp and PgDown to go up and down. 'C' to change camera: free, inside the projectile down, tracking the projectile, inside the projectile up.

To change the force to throw the piston: 'W': +1, 'S': -1, 'A': -10,'D': +10.
To throw the piston (so apply the selected force): SPACE
To change the force of the explosion: 'U':+0.5, 'J':-0.5, SHIFT+'U','J': faster change. The factor can be negative, the projectiles will implode then.
To apply a huge force on the piston: 'T' (if you push it too long, the piston will arrive outside the Newton world, in this case you will not see the timers running, as they are into the piston callback (crappy I know) )
To create more object: F6 (some) or F7 (more)
To spawn some building: '1' to '0'. The '5' building is not "touched" by the explosion, it does not use the simple explosion callback. The '2' tower is a killer for Newton, so never spawn two!!! (I wrote this building creation for Novodex, Newton does not like the stack as much as it :) ). The buildings first create a base for them so they can be horizontal... It is a little bit ugly and not cleaned (size, position, building look...).
To quit: ESC
Throw some balls: 'x' or 'b' (not sensible to explosions).
Pause: 'P'

The Giant Ball will be back

Hi all,
   So the old Giant Ball web site (well the second one) is dead, and I haven't decided what to do yet. I want to continue offering the free games online and most of the former content, but with something simpler.
Please be patient and feel free to contact me if you have any question (or would like to see one game appear earlier).