Our second game, Cally’s Caves 2 released on July 1st, 2014 on the Appstore.  We wrote extensively about the development of the game, and then wrote a bunch of stuff about getting mentioned in the gaming media, but we’ve never really taken a look back at some of the methods we used to promote the game and how they worked out.  Since Cally’s Caves 2 is now a year old, let’s have a look at how it has done, and some of the lessons we learned about game development.

First off, let’s see the total download numbers:

Lesson #1: Featuring and Gaming Websites are Crucial

We ended up with 162,000 downloads of our free game (please note we scrubbed the money totals out of this image), and that was amazing.  In the initial month of July 2014, we hit over 82,000 downloads, and we strongly believe that this was mostly due to some good reviews on sites like Toucharcade, Pocketgamer, and 148apps, and being featured by Apple.  Although Cally’s Caves 2 was never featured in a banner at the top of the Appstore, we did get featured at the top of a good number of categories internationally, usually the “What’s New” or “What’s Hot” category.  Apple featured us in various places for 7 weeks, and has continued to put it in feature spots sporadically ever since.  It’s hard to miss that the graph takes a big dip right around September 2014, so Apple featuring the game clearly had a huge impact on downloads.

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(some of the sounds are still WIP)

We were bored and decided to stream some playtesting on Twitch.  This video shows most of the first 3 zones, but a bunch of the assets are placeholder.

Cally’s Caves soundtracks have always been weird.  This is the result of the creative process being pretty open and non-restrictive.  I start with a feeling or general mood for a track, start writing, and hope the result is something good.  In the past, the result has usually turned out to be some weird piece of music that isn’t really genre specific, but somehow suits the game (although a lot of music gets cut along the way that doesn’t quite fit in).  People seemed to like the soundtrack for Cally’s Caves 2 a lot, so our goal with the music for 3 was pretty simple: create better, more memorable music.  We want to make the music more tied to the characters and story by giving characters and events specific themes (a technique used to great effect in our favorite TV shows like LOST and Battlestar Galactica).  We want the music be tied to the levels a bit more this time as well, to help give each zone a better sense of place.  More than anything, though, we just want to bring more weirdness to the game with some unique music.

Bera’s Theme

Bera is a new Character in Cally’s Caves 3, and like all the characters we wanted her to have her own theme.  Bera is one of the early bear enemies from Cally’s Caves 2, who Cally rescues and befriends near the beginning of CC3.  After this there are a few levels that Bera must traverse alone, and we wanted a song for those levels that suits Bera’s carefree attitude.

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Here’s our video of finishing up the song from Part 1.  Thanks for watching!