We just released our first trailer for Cally’s Caves 2… Here it is!
Uncategorized
Cally’s Caves 2 OST now available on Bandcamp!
Since we had wrapped up our soundtrack work on Cally’s Caves 2, we figured we might as well put it up on Bandcamp and see what happens! We will be linking to the Bandcamp in a “support the developers” tip in the game. It’s pretty much our “donate” button for Cally’s Caves 2, since the game will be totally free. Enjoy the tunes, and if you like them, there’s 21 full tracks for only 3 dollars. Also, if you don’t want to pay, there’s always our Soundcloud, which has a decent number of the tracks available for free.
Development Diary # 10: Implementing Feedback from the Beta
Sorry it’s been a while since our last update! It’s crunch time for Cally’s Caves 2, which means we are spending a ton of time polishing, bug fixing, and getting ready to submit to Apple. In our last post we detailed how we hoped our Beta test would go, and at this point we have wrapped up the testing phase. It didn’t last the 8 weeks we planned on, it actually only took about 2 weeks to receive feedback from all of our testers. We thought it would be a good time to discuss the feedback we received, and how we are using it to make our game a lot more user-friendly and fun.
The Testers
We ended up having 15 people beta test Cally’s Caves 2, which doesn’t seem like a lot, but for an indie developer like us, it was a gold mine of useful information. I put a post up on my personal Facebook and Twitter pages, and the testers all volunteered from there. Of all the testers, only 2 people tested the game on iPad, 5 people used iPhone 5 or 5s, and the rest were on the older iPhone 4 or 4s models. We were lucky to have a wide range of devices testing the game, and that’s mostly just due to luck with who signed up. We also (as detailed in our pre-beta dev diary), sent out an introduction package and survey with the beta files, which most of the people filled out. It also helped to have my phone near me, as testers would often text me the bugs, which I would then add to my to-do list. We did have people report quite a few bugs, which was amazing because we may have never found them if we were testing the game ourselves. Continue reading
Cally’s Caves 2: Development Diary #9 – Getting Ready for Testing
Putting something you crafted into someone else’s hands is a harrowing experience. When that person’s gaze locks onto the object you created, a shift happens. What was once your private project is no longer your own, and a singular experience becomes shared one. It can be amazing or terrifying, but either way you will walk away from that shared experience with an idea of how you could have approached your creation differently. The beauty of game development is you can choose to incorporate the feedback you gain from sharing your creation with others before your product is finalized. This is why we have dedicated a two-month period to beta testing Cally’s Caves 2. In today’s Dev Diary we will discuss how we have approached the 8-week beta test period of our game’s development, and what we hope to gain from putting Cally’s Caves 2 in the hands of playtesters.
Cally’s Caves 2 Development Blog #8 – More on Level Design in a 2D game
We already posted on some of the thoughts behind the level design in Cally’s Caves 2 a while ago. In the time since that blog came out we’ve made a number of crucial decisions regarding how the levels will be laid out. Also, the overall level design is such an important part of developing a 2D game that we figured it would be worth another post to discuss some of the decisions we’ve made. We’ve already written about how we approach tutorials, the smaller level sizes, and increasing density of objects in a level, so this time we are going to focus on the smaller things that go into making a level for Cally’s Caves 2.
Hazards
A good 2D platformer should always be fun to run and jump around in. Player movement mechanics are incredibly important, and part of developing player movement is figuring out how the player’s interaction with the environment works. If the player stands on a brick block, they shouldn’t fall through it. If the player runs into a wall, horizontal movement should stop. Basic stuff, right? But if that’s all there is to the game, it might get a bit boring after a while (although plenty of games don’t, and are awesome). Introducing hazards allows a designer to inject some danger into a level design, which helps keep the player on their toes. It also increases the reward value for a player when they beat a level. Would a player feel more satisfaction if they ran down a level that was designed like a hallway, or if they navigated through a maze-like level filled with spikes and lava pits? We believe the latter provides more opportunity for player satisfaction, although there isn’t an objectively correct answer.
Development Diary #7: Art!
Today’s Dev Diary is written by Yal, who is one of the two artists working on Cally’s Caves 2 (along with OHKO). She shares some of her experiences and insights into the process of creating art for a 2d platformer.
A guest article? Does that mean… there is a guest?! Um, well, yeah. Long story short: OHKO asked me whether I was interested in helping out doing some weapon graphics for Cally’s Caves 2. I said yes. Done, stop yawning. Now let’s change subject to the actual graphics! =]
Since a large majority of all AAA games released nowadays are FPS games, it’s only natural that they use guns. The problem is, most of them also try to be vaguely realistic, which in turn means all weapons are of the type “fires bullets in a straight line”. Now how fun is that? This also generally results in unbalanced weapons, since if all weapons fire in a straight line, why bother getting more than one? The answer is: because every new weapon is tons better than the previous one, so why bother keeping that anyway?
Contrast that with a game like Cave Story by Studio Pixel:
(Official screenshot from the game manual) Continue reading
Development Diary #6: RPG Mechanics
Levelling up and increasing different aspects of a character is one of my favorite parts of playing games. Series like the Elder Scrolls and the Ratchet and Clank games have always kept me hooked through the promise of being able to see a little meter fill up and know I’m about to reach that next level. Considering how deeply RPG mechanics hook me, it should come as no surprise that Cally’s Caves 2 includes a number of mechanics that will help Cally grow more powerful as the game progresses. Player leveling, finding weapons, leveling up those weapons, the upgrade shop, and in-game currency – these are the RPG mechanics at the core of Cally’s Caves 2. Since we are making a sequel we can some of the ideas we had for the original game and taking them as far as we can.
Development Diary #5: Player Movement and Screen Real Estate
A lot of the decisions behind the original Cally’s Caves movement and combat were made based on the platform the game was shipping on. Screen real estate is a big issue with iOS games, especially ones that use virtual controls. A few years ago, an iOS game came out called “Pizza Boy” that utilized a virtual control idea that I thought was brilliant. Instead of including a virtual joystick that would move in 4 or 8 directions (or using 4 directional buttons), Pizza Boy used a “slider” for left and right movement and simply did away with up and down movement. I’m not sure if it was the first iOS game to use this tactic (that may be League of Evil, or others), but simplifying the control scheme like that minimizes the amount of screen real estate dedicated to controls.
Development Diary #4 – On Level Design in a 2d Game
One of the greatest challenges developing Cally’s Caves 2 is how to go about designing 100 levels while keeping the game fresh. Cally’s Caves had 27 levels, not including boss rooms or the challenge “subrooms.” At the time, it seemed like a good idea to differentiate each level by the use of music, tile sets, and area names. Every time you entered a new level, a new song would start playing, and every five levels the environment sprites would change. While this worked to a certain degree, a large number of players played the first few levels and then gave up (either out of frustration at the difficulty, or just not enjoying the game). This unfortunately led to a number of the levels and environment sets never being seen. In retrospect, we may have been better off if we had changed the tile set every level and just rotated the four sets that we had. Hindsight is 20/20, and having that hindsight doesn’t affect the product we already released. It does, however, allow us to approach a sequel with the lessons we learned in mind. Hopefully, using the lessons we learned, we can make the levels in Cally Caves 2 do a lot more for the player.
Development Diary #3: Music Beginnings
I started working on the music for our second game before we knew we would be making a sequel to Cally’s Caves. This is mostly due to the fact that I’ve always been into making music using Propellerheads’ Reason software, as well as playing guitar and piano in my spare time. In the lull between games, I knew I could be productive by just making some songs and experimenting with different sounds and chord progression ideas. I was proud of the music from Cally’s Caves and wanted to continue to make tracks since I find it very creatively satisfying, even if my ears are the only ones hearing it.
The general feel of the soundtrack in Cally’s Caves was not exactly coherent, it was a melange of upbeat, hyper tracks, and ambient, atmospheric ones. I liked the way the music evoked different moods in the different levels, but I know I can do better this time around, and give the soundtrack more of a coherent feel. That being said, my musical process remains the same, and it always begins with a guitar or piano.
(note – this diary links to my soundcloud for the tracks I’m writing about, since WordPress doesn’t like audio files)
https://soundcloud.com/jordan-pearson-10/cally-2-lloyds-theme
“Lloyd’s Theme” was one of the first tracks I composed for Cally 2, and I came up with the idea while noodling on my guitar. I eventually came up with the verse and chorus riffs, which are incredibly simple (and not very well-played in the recording). Lloyd is a character that helps Cally learn the systems of the game, and appears at many different points throughout Cally 2. He’s always sitting there, playing guitar, and I wanted a guitar-based theme to play every time he shows up, so the player hears it and knows a tutorial is sure to follow, a Pavlov’s dog kind of situation. After recording the acoustic bits, I fed them into reason, sequenced them, and created a simple drumbeat, bassline, and synth melody to round out the track. It’s very simple, but that’s the feel I was going for, and I hope that it will come across like Lloyd is playing the guitar in the final product. Continue reading
Cally's Caves 