First Enemy Encounter: !SPOILER ALERT! This gameplay video is showing how to survive the first enemy encounter in level 6. MOTHER has just arrived on Mars and is sending her minions to disassemble Clark’s friends and home. As Clark has no weapon and no fighting routine, his only option is to run for his life. The main objective in this action loaded puzzle is to dodge the deadly beams shot by the hostile Tankbot. You will have to play hide and seek for the (long) time that your friend the Fuse-Drone needs to reach the switch opening the exit door. Unfortunately the drone gets stuck halfway for her way is blocked by a barrier. So while escaping the enemy you will have to move on a switch opening that barrier and allowing the Drone to continue. If you are skilled the Tankbot will do the job for you and move on the switch himself.

Story: MOTHER is a supercomputer embeded in a gigantic spaceship. Howering above Clark’s factory she launches landing capsules for her robotic army. On arrival the Tankbots immediately start the recycling routine. They will search and destroy any “disfunctional” (in other words: partying”) Workerbots.

Tactics: The Tankbots move very fast and and will often use their laser beams to shoot orthogonal to their movement direction. We designed them like chess tower pieces: They are moving on one grid axis and kill everything on the other axis using their beams like a moving line of destruction. Fortunately they need more time to rotate their heavy chains. Therefore they are not able to change their movement direction very quickly. If you keep that in mind and hide behind corners it is much easier to outmaneuveur them.

The diagram above shows that the position Clark is currently standing on is not secure: The enemy will instantly move to position A and shoot. However, if Clark moves to position B and hides behind the obstacle the Tankbot has to rotate his chains first before moving on to position C. This pause will give you enough time to race around the corner and hide again. So the fun is to keep an eye on the enemy and his base rotation and choose your hiding spots accordingly. That’s how you survive until your friend, the Drone, has opened the exit. So even the action scenes in CLARK are tactical puzzles – puzzles on speed that is.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZK_Y4wL7Ak&list=UUqw5PNlXSHg-hlkm5IOdBWw]

Time to strike back: Despite of having no weapon Clark will find ways to defend himself. The laser beams of the Tankbots work like all beams in the game. They are an energy source that Clark can use and manipulate by positioning beam-bending boxes. We have developed puzzles where you need the enemy’s laser energy to open doors or trigger other mechanisms. The task is how to convince him of working for you. In level 8 we designed a situation where Clark can bend the attaking beam in such a way that the Tankbot actually kills himself. Clark has no aggressive behaviour modes but can’t prevent enemies from comitting suicide, right?

During our last testing session we got lots of comments concerning controls: A touch screen will never really live up to a good old GameBoy. Still we developed a control concept using virtual buttons instead of touch gestures or single touches into the game world. Most of our testers understood this concept intuitively but as this topic is so crucial we want to give you some insight about the other variants we experimented with. We also would like to profit from your experiences with touch devices. Probably you have discovered some innovative designs which would fit to our game – or maybe you just have some great ideas how to improve our current controls.

Read more about our experiments with controls …

CLARK is our first shot at developing a mobile game. We are currently testing the first playable levels and want to show you some screenshots of the game running on actual devices.

In the middle of the screen you can see a small yellow figure… that’s Clark our main character, a simple, hard-working industrial robot. Clark loves boxes – and order. The only thing he did during his entire existence is putting boxes – in order. He would probably have continued his well-structured work for another 200 years, if the factory’s core control unit hadn’t decided to shut down the inefficient production plant. Trying to repair the disassembled parts in his close environment Clark suddenly finds himself fighting a much greater chaos. As he continues his sorting routine our small forklift bot unknowingly initiates a revolt against the ongoing recycling of his generation.

Help Clark to survive the dangers of a collapsing factory. Try to escape the next-gen cleansing bots and to rescue his fellows from the trashyard.

If everything works out we will release CLARK for smartphones and tablet for both iOS and Android simultaneously. But there is still lots of work to do… We will keep you updated.

Matthias (Coder for Golden Tricycle)