An Alien with a Magnet - by RZDESIGN and Rejected Games

​

Welcome to the galaxy of An Alien with a Magnet, an amazing new platform-adventure-puzzler with a literal twist! Pick up diamonds, find secret orbs and unlock new levels to get the alien home safely in this new crazy iOS game.

Take control of our Alien and his spaceship and get him back to his home planet using just a magnet. Get ready to explore multiple galaxies using this magnet to orbit around colorful and unique planets to get to your goal. But beware of dark holes, challenging puzzles, multiple locks and asteroids blocking your path in space!

Besides the adventure mode, you can also play an extra bonus mode which will keep you busy for even more hours of fun gameplay! Beat your friends in the online leaderboards with Time Attack and prove to them once and for all you are faster than they are!

Expect this fun and amazing new iOS game arriving on your iPhone, iPod Touch iPad on August 1st 2013!

​

Features

• The single touch gameplay will get you started instantly! It’s easy to control but hard to master! Don’t let the cute looks of our Alien fool you!
• The first exciting new genre, known as an action/arcade/puzzle/adventure/rotating-platformer! (a.k.a. AAPARP)
• Help our alien to get back to his home planet using the only tool he got working on his spaceship: a magnet.
• 45+ amazing handcrafted levels filled with an adventure you won’t forget.
• Fast, Faster, Fastest! Prove your speed in Time Attack! Play the Adventure mode with another mindset!
• Beautiful high resolution visuals and professional looking artwork throughout the game.
• Fully packed with leaderboard rankings and over 20+ achievements within Game Center!
• Do you like to brag? We do! Share your replay videos on YouTube, Facebook Twitter! Thanks to the built-in Everyplay service.
• Music composed by Waterflame. Known for his work for the critically acclaimed indie title Castle Crashers

Release Date
August 2013

Website/Blog/Social
http://www.an-alien-with-a-magnet.com
http://www.facebook.com/AnAlienwithaMagnet
http://www.twitter.com/AlienMagnetGame

Online Presskit
www.rejected-games.com/press/sheet.php?p=an_alien_with_a_magnet

About us
Lukas Hoenderdos is a game developer at heart and likes getting his hands deep in code. After four years of working in the game industry at an award winning studio, he decided it was time to go independent and started his own company, Rejected Games. An Alien with a Magnet will be it’s first released title.

Ricardo de Zoete is an artist who has started his career as a illustrator, creating different mascots for small Dutch companies. He’s graduated as a Animation and Games designer. During his study he working as an intern at the same award winning studio as Lukas, where they actually first met each other. He was also working as a Visual Designer at his freelance company called RZDESIGN. After all that he decided to fully submerge into creating games himself.

His first game was Push Panic! which which was a collaboration with Barry Kostjens, released on iOS and has been downloaded over 2 million copies since then. After that he created Hyper Breaker Turbo, a Breakout-like game with a modern look and feel. An Alien with a Magnet is his third big title for iOS and also his first game for other platforms.

​

 

awesome art. at what stage are u guys?. it would be nice to see some gameplay video

 

looks like a winner in my books, shame to try enter the market at this current time! hopefully it improves in tme for your release

 

Looks awesome! Can't wait.

 

Currently we are heavily in development and we don't have video's to show you, yet. Over time we keep on posting new art, screenshots and other interesting stuff. The character is now being finalised so you can expect that pretty soon (next week?)

Not sure what you mean with the current market. As I see it, iOS keeps getting more and more new customers!

Thanks for the kind words!

 

Here's an update on what we've been working on. We have been really busy sorting a lot of game mechanics and some 'final' graphics that will actually be used in game.

The screens we've showed so far were early concept artworks which give a basic idea of the game look and feel. For now, we have finalised the graphics for the main character sprite. (excluding character animations)
Also we have finished one planet to use in our development to sort out the controls and feel you have while playing with the base gameplay mechanic and how the character responds to that.

Here are some before and after images of how the graphics were in the concept art and how they will be in the final game. And yes, the whole game will be hand-drawn!

​

We would love to share more of our progress in the future!

 

Its been way too long since the last post. No worries, we’ve still been working hard on An Alien with a Magnet. Today we want to show you the teaser video we’ve made. Its short and probably leaves you with all kind of questions.

Fun fact: it took us 6 hours to create this 20 seconds video. If you have the bandwidth please check the 1080p version

 

Its been waaaay too long with we are still alive!

Things are shaping up nicely but it takes a lot more time then anticipated. (will that ever change?) Currently we are working hard on getting the levels done. We are at 19 levels so far, we probably end up with a lot more!

In the next month you can expect to see a lot more updates/images/video's of our development journey, as I feel guilty neglecting you guys.

In the mean time, here's a teaser from some time ago. It shows a little bit of our first level ever, which has been dramatically overhauled by now

 

Nice!

 

Things are coming along really nice lately so I wanted to share these screenshots. I've also recorded me building a level in 2hours and I am planning to create a timelapse of it, which must look cool

What do you think? Like it or hate it?

 

This looks amazing and inspiring!

 

Thanks Peter!

It has taken us a while but we finally have some real ingame footage!
Its a complete play through of "Yellow Brick Road" one the easy levels. It should give a clear view of the core gameplay. Its recorded in full hd so it will look nice fullscreen.

I'm hoping you guys like it

 

This looks amazing still. Forgive me as I haven't read through the whole thread, but is this game released yet?

 

Looks very cool! Although a little hard to tell what exactly is going on with the gameplay. love the colours and art style.
Best of luck with the project!

 

wow, this looks very polished. Love the art style and the music. When is it out?

 

The graphical style is absolutely wonderful.
From the video the gameplay is not so clear. Do you move the alien ship with your finger all around each planet and then you "kick" it to the next planet while collecting all the stars and bonuses? Or is it more automated and you only have to decide when to jump out the planet's orbit? Just curious.
Anyway it looks promising.

 

Sorry all for the late reply! We've been showing and playtesting An Alien with a Magnet at the Festival of Games event for the past few days. So far, people seem to really like it, which makes us really proud. We have a lot of feedback and energy which we will put into making the game even better.

I'll try to answer all your questions! English isn't my native language so when something isn't totally clear, please tell me

As for the release, it hasn't been released yet. We're now six months into development and we need (atleast) two more. Keep in mind we are just two guys, one programmer (me) and one artist.

As for the gameplay: it is a one button game where your whole screen is the button. When you touch and hold anywhere on the screen you active the magnet and you start circleling around the planet. When your release you fly / float away in the direction you are in at that moment. The magnet however can only snap onto a planet when you're in range of the atmospheres / orbits around the planets.
The magnet costs power when you use it, luckily there are planets where you can 'suck' energy out of it.
Your goal is simple, get the to the end of the level / galaxy to fly to the next one.

Hopefully with this info and the video it will make the gameplay much clearer.
Thank you so much for the reactions, its great to hear!

If you have questions about the game, programming or unity stuff, just reply and I'll do my best!

 

So our audio guy is working hard, we've got all the music in place, now its time to replace those mockup sound effect.

Have I told you guys already that Waterflame is doing all our audio? If don't know Waterflame, have you ever played Castle Crashers? The music in it is his. He's an amazing artist and we are very glad he was interested in An Alien with a Magnet.

To give you a taste of whats the music is going to be like, we've released the Official SoundTrack of An Alien with a Magnet on YouTube

Let me know what you think! Does it fit the art style and overal feel?

[video=youtube_share;Lga_1OvPE6U]http://youtu.be/Lga_1OvPE6U

 

Very nice!
Do you used stuff coming from asset store, or everything is made by you ? (for 2d managing for example)

 

When ever it saves time, I will use stuff from the AssetStore. Creating a game takes long already long enough. I'm now 7 months in and finally I am beginning to see the end of my todolist

What I've used from the AssetStore:
- NGUI: I dare to say I'm pretty pro with it so there's no reason not to use it. It is also by far the best gui system, hopefully it doesn't get as bloated as EZ GUI for example.
- JCloud: for iCloud storage. Super easy, its literally just replacing your PlayerPrefs.XXX calls.
- Advanced PlayerPrefs Window: This is actually one of my own assets I created during the development cycle. I use PlayerPrefs to store "are music or soundfx muted?" states;
- Prime31: Social Plugin

For 2D however I created my own sprite system. Many of the systems out there are way to big / complicated for my means. I've tested a couple and I didn't like them. One of the most populair ones had the worst "feature" ever; when a sprite got changed in size and updated in the atlas, it didn't update the sprites in the scene to the new size. Thats a showstopper as sprites change a lot in the early stages and I'm not going to do that by hand. Another thing that bugged me was that most systems use their "own" unit space where I wanted to use unity units where 1 unit = 1 pixel. Basicly this means set the camera orthographicsize to halve of the height of the device screen resolution.

It did cost some time creating the system but when ever I need a feature I just ninja in, fix it and ninja out. It definitly saved me time in the end and performance is superb.

I have created a lot of other tiny editor extentions to make my life as easy as posible. There a tool to (re-)order the 35+ levels in the levelselect. There is a tool to instantiate prefabs patterns which we use mostly for big area's of stars. There is a tool which let you pick colors and saves them automaticly for having your own color pallets. And some other menu item actions

I hope this is some what helpfull

 

I played this game at the Festival of Games in the Netherlands a couple of weeks ago and I really liked it, it is very well designed and fun to play.
Best of luck with the rest of the development process

Groetjes!

 

Thx for answer !

 

So the otherday I captured my screen while creating a level from scratch. This was a 3 hour recording and we timelapsed it to just 3 minutes. You can also spot some of our tools and custom editors. I believe I also fixed a bug during the creation of that level

If you like to watch it in Full HD, please visit this YouTube link

It really shows how awesome Unity is

 

Hey guys! RZDESIGN (Ricardo) here! I'm the other half of this game... And I'm happy to inform you that An Alien with a Magnet has been accepted in the App Store and will be released worldwide for €0.99 $0.99. Also we've completely overhauled our website and created an official trailer! You can check out both underneath this post! Lukas will update the first post asap!

Our Official Website: http://www.an-alien-with-a-magnet.com

 

This game looks awesome, but it is extremely similar to a demo posted a while back: Here.

Did you use that as inspiration for anything?

 

I'm probably going to disappoint you, no we didn't use that as inspiration

We didn't use any inspiration gameplay wise, our mission was not to copy a game to make it better. We just sat down, brainstormed, prototyped and tweaked. I agree, it does strongly resemble the rotating mechanics like Super Knights, Slingshot Racing or Sunshine. When you'll play it you'll notice it feels much different then those games.

As for inspiration look and feel wise, we looked at games we like on the Wii, for example New Super Mario Bros and Rayman Jungle Run. On iOS that would translate to Angry Birds and Cut The Rope.
We wanted a casual game with simple controls which would be easy to learn but hard to master. The goal was to appeal to the majority of the crowd.

Does this satisfy your question?

 

Yes. Thankyou.

 

Looks awesome, I'll be sure to download!

Hey, if it has already been approved, why not just release now? I read Apple locks your release date in as the day the app was approved. So if you don't release immediately it won't show up under 'new apps' ...unless they've fixed this?

 

Did you guys use trailrenderer for that awesome trail?

 

We don't release it immediately because of all the marketing stuff we are doing. Once your app is approved you get promocodes, with those codes people can download the game eventhough it hasn't been released yet. We've send the promocodes to reviewers that are interested and they've agreed to schedule their review on our launchday, 1 august. This way we, hopefully, get a big boost on day one to climb the charts.

Since the AppStore change there is no new or updated category anymore. There is a New and Noteworthy but thats being featured by Apple basicly.

As for the trail, yep thats a trail renderer! Actually there are two, but only one is visible all the time. I switch between them when ever you get teleported, if I wouldn't do that, you would see the trail going from portal A to portal B. The trailrenderer is a bit of a bitch to work with as you can't reset the trail and you can't change the color array! I use a selfmade 'hue shader' to do the color changing, this way white stays white and black black.

Feel free to ask what ever you guys are interested in! I'll be happy to answer where I can

 

Tomorrow! !

 

This may have already been addressed in the thread so forgive me - but is there any chance of this coming to android?

 

An Alien with a Magnet is now available in every region on the AppStore!
We're using Apple new prices which means $0.99 or €0.99. If you have any questions, technical of gameplay wise, just post them here as I'll be watching this topic closely!

No need to apologise! Yes its coming to Android too, we're using Unity after all!
We're aiming at early september, no promises though. If you follow this topic, you can't really miss it.

 

Good work guys. Downloaded and rated 5!

I've made it to level 10. So far so good. At first I thought it was a little easy and didn't really see how collecting could get difficult, but by level 8 or so it started to get a little tricky.

What I would like to see (also something I think should have been a primary game mechanic) is each planet's magnetosphere "drain" as you circle around it. As in, you can only circle 2-3 times before a planet drains of its magnetism and grays out/dies/cannot be used. This would enable two things: 1) strategic planning, as you'd have to prevent draining yourself into a corner. And 2) another optional level goal - "drain all" ...completes if you finish the level and drain all planets in the system.

All in all I think this app is going to do very well and I'm impressed. Good mechanics, awesome main character, pretty art, and goooooood music. Great work guys! Look forward to beating it!

 

Waterflame

 

Thanks for buying it and the rating, I really appreciate it.

We hear a lot if people saying the start is boring and too easy so we're going to change that in an update. Just to speed up the pace a little bit. Thats something we didn't see when playtesting, perhaps we had a bit too much casual gamers?

Thank for the feedback too. We actually had something similair in mind as a gamemode but after 8 months we had to put the feature stop into place.
As for the music:

Absolutely, Waterflame creates awesome music and is a very nice guy!

 

Ah yeah, I think that's probably the only real irk. I felt, when I started, that level 9 would have made a great level 3, because it was linear and easy, but introduced the white cannon thing and was very fun to watch. Definitely felt like it picked up right at level 9. And now I'm pretty into it.