Taxi by Night has finally launch on early access, and just in time for the itch Halloween Sale!
You can get a 10% launch discount until November 4th!
If you want to know more about how the updates will work, and what do you get for buying the game early, we have a detailed FAQ post. In case you have any further questions, you can leave a comment here, on the game page or even through our channels on Discord, Twitter or even email minichimeragamestudio@gmail.com.
We have also set up a rewards program as a way for you to support the game in case you really like it, or even have a say or become a character in the game yourself. You can check all the rewards on the game page.
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I hope you enjoy the game, and if you do, please let us know, and help spread the word about it.
If you don’t like it, leave a comment as well, we’re doing early access because we need your help to make the game better =)
On this post, I will write about something very important that we have been working on for a long time: the map of New Wenders!
We’re not Bethesda, so we didn’t start the game with a map, on the contrary, the idea for the map came in very late, when the story was already finished. More precisely, when we updated the game to widescreen aspect ration.
If you played the preview version on itch, you probably noticed the map is just a placeholder and serves to nothing but aesthetics. But we wanted to make it interactive and something the player can use as a reference for story events.
We ended up removing the “chapter select” screen that is on the preview version. This screen was supposed to appear every time a chapter ended, as a transition to a new location.
Old Chapter Select Screen
But since we now had a map, it made more sense to show the transition through it.
New Chapter Screen
Nothing fancy, the pin just moves from the current location to the new. This will also show up when loading a game, so the player will be able to see all important events from the current playthrough.
The pin show where the player is now. A red dot indicates a location already visited in the current save; A blue dot indicates a location visited in a previous save; A yellow dot indicates a location still unknown.
The player can also access the smaller version of the map at anytime. When he passes the mouse over the points marking the locations, he will see some information like how many passages has he visited and what events happened in each location.
Location Events
The evens will written in bold if it happened during the current save, and grayed out if it happened in a previous save. If the player never seen experienced the event, it will show as ??????. In a similar way, the visited passages for the location appear in bold, while the known passages from all playthroughs appear grayed out.
This will make it easier (and more interesting) for players trying to see 100% of the passages or events =)
This post is more focused on the map itself, later on I will talk more about New Wenders. What kind of city is it? What kind of people inhabit it? What do they feed on?
This Ludum Dare’s theme was “The more you have, the worse it is”. I didn’t have a lot of time so I setup to do something very simple: a clicker about lootboxes.
As it often happens, even though it was a simple idea, I didn’t have time to do everything I wanted, but the spirit of the whole thing is there.
The idea for this game was to take the concept of the classic “Rock, Paper, Scissors” game and try to do something cool and different, so the first thing that came to my mind was “what if the players have to throw big stones with the Rock/Paper/Scissor shapes at each other?”.
So we tried to think about it as if it were a kind of Sport, with spectators and all, something that would be like a mixture of Sumo and Jan-Ken-Po.
The game respects the rules of Jan Ken Po, so if a player holding a “Rock” stone hits a player holding a “Scissor” stone, the one holding the Rock will win. If one player holding a stone hits a player who is not holding any stones, the player holding the stone wins, regardless of the stone. The first player to win 2 rounds, wins the game.
The GameJam itself is based on the Famicase Exhibition that takes place in Japan every year, where artist draw the cover art for games that don’t exist. So basically the only rule is that you have to choose one of these covers and make a game based on it. This is the now we chose:
This past weekend we participated on a local GameJam in Limassol, Cyprus. The game jam lasted 48 hours, and the theme was Japan. Another requisites included using Microsoft Azure platform, Unity3D and some kind of multiplayer or leaderboards.
We tried to steer away from the most common themes like Ninjas and Samurais, so our entry was called Yokai Mask, inspired by the traditional Japanese masks used in dances and theater.
In Yokai Mask you play as a little girl who has to avoid and trick the Yokai by using masks that make her look like them. Another think we wanted was to create a game without combat, so instead of killing your enemies you must avoid them or drive them away, making it more of a puzzle platform than action.
Since we were very happy with the result we intend to polish the game a bit more, do a better level design and make it a bit longer. The game also got 2nd place on the Game Jam.
Recently took this project out of the drawer and decided it’s time to finish it. It’s the first game we started when we created MiniChimera, but as it often happens we got sidetracked with other projects. It also helped that took me roughly 3 years to finish writing the whole story.
We’ll have a sort of “preview” available soon, probably sometime this month, on Itch.io. This will include the first chapter of the game (from a total of 10), and it’s called The Alley. This preview will be used to gather some feedback as we implement the rest of the game, and also as a mean to help spread the word.
This is a choose your own adventure game about a man who wakes up from a blackout in a dark street in the middle of the night. He soon learns he took part in something terrible that caused the blackout, so the player has a choice to steer away from it and go home, or dig into it. The story changes a lot depending on the player’s choice, and there is no game over or dice rolls, only different paths and endings.
The story and mood highly inspired by White Wolf’s World of Darkness and H.P. Lovecraft. It’s a seemingly normal world with a lot of twisted stuff happening in the shadows, just beyond the reach of a regular passerby, but as soon as someone get’s a glimpse of what’s going on, there’s no way back.
At some point along the project we changed the style to make it look like a comic book, here’s some comparison shots. It’s hard to believe I was once satisfied with the old style, initially I wanted something more along the “black and white” style, but now I cannot look back. It’s a good reminder that you should keep changing and iterating until you are completely satisfied!
Thank you for stopping by, the next post will probably be about the launch of the preview! 😉
Snap Quiz is a fast paced quiz featuring more than a hundred questions from 11 categories including movies, books, video games, geography, music, famous quotes and more!
Check it out!
If you have any suggestions for themes or questions, send an email to snapquiz@minichimera.com =)
I’m happy to announce Lunata Rescue is launching today!
We’ve been working with Insignia Games for quite a while on this game, it’s a beautiful 2D platformer with handdrawn maps and it’s available for free on iOS, Android and Windows Phone! Check it out and tell us what you think =)
Mini Chimera Game Studio 