Cally’s Caves 3 Free Expansion “Melvin’s Prototype Factory” Coming Next Week!

October 7, 2015October 9, 2015 ~ callyscaves ~ 4 Comments

After a busy couple of months, we’ve just submitted a huge new content update for Cally’s Caves 3, “Melvin’s Prototype Factory.” The update should be out for iOS and Android next week.

This is the biggest update we’ve ever done for a game, and will include a bunch of new features:

Massive New Zone:
We’ve added a whole new 34-level zone, with all-new art, a fully functional map and lots of Checkpoints.

New Weapons: 3 new weapons and their final forms can be found in the new Levels! Try using the power of the Slimes for your own benefit with the Slimegun, trap enemies and prevent them from hurting you with the Web Shooters, or use the Bow and Arrow from Cally’s Caves 2 to pepper enemies with arrows. All of the new weapons have 4 evolution tiers, and can be used throughout all of the other game modes.

New Enemies: Melvin has been creating bosses in his prototype lab for years, and to destroy him, you’ll have to defeat them all! 5 new enemy classes with unique behaviors mix up the combat and test your skills.

Beyond all of the new content, we will have a ton of bug fixes and optimizations including the following:

iOS

fixed issue where Final Bladegun isn’t being awarded for beating Survival Mode
fixed issue where Bera would sometimes transform into Cally in “Bera: the Long Way Home”

Android

greatly reduced frequency of video ads
fixed missing Sniper Rifle issue – find it in level 101
fixed rating message in pause menu
fixed several small resolution bugs
several new tracks on the soundtrack

We are also happy to announce that the expansion is totally free and is not an in-app purchase or anything like that. We wanted to find a way to thank all the people that have downloaded and supported Cally’s Caves 3. We will have at least one more free expansion out before Christmas, and an announcement of our next project shortly after.

Cally’s Caves 3 Reviews and Discussion

August 31, 2015August 31, 2015 ~ callyscaves ~ 1 Comment

Hey everyone! It’s been over a month since Cally’s Caves 3 came out, so we thought we’d put together some links to articles and reviews of the game. Here we go:

Cally’s Caves 3 Gets 5 Stars from Toucharcade

Cally’s Caves 3 Gets Silver Award from PocketGamer

Cally’s Caves 3 Gamezebo Review

Cally’s Caves 3 148apps review

Cally’s Caves 3 mentioned in Gameranx top 10 free iOS games of July video.

Galie video series about Cally’s Caves 3

Phonecats video about Cally’s Caves 3

We are just wrapping up work on the android port of Cally’s Caves 3, which should be out soon. There is also an update coming out this week, which includes a whole new zone with new art, and it’s all about telling Bera’s Story! We will have some more dev diaries breaking down how things went with Cally’s Caves 3 real soon…

Cally’s Caves 3 Announcement!

November 15, 2014November 15, 2014 ~ callyscaves ~ 2 Comments

This shouldn’t come as a shock to anyone reading this. If you finished the bonus levels in Cally’s Caves 2, or follow us on Twitter or Soundcloud, you probably know that we have been working on Cally’s Caves 3 for some time now. After the wonderful time we had with Cally’s Caves 2, we decided to put the puzzle game we were working on to the side and try to keep the ball rolling with the Cally franchise. So, what’s in store for Cally on her next adventure?

Cally’s Caves 3 is another chance for us to aspire to make the best platformer on iOS. We’ve taken a lot of the feedback we received from the first two games and are putting it to use while developing Cally’s Caves 3. The biggest change is that we are adding a new game plus mode, which will give players a lot more reasons to come back and keep playing. After finishing the campaign (124 levels or so), new game plus mode will open up. Another tier of weapon upgrades will open up, leading towards a god-tier final form for each weapon. Instead of just making new game plus be like the campaign again but harder, we are adding new enemies and weapon types into new game plus, and the one “true” story ending to the game will be at the end of the new game plus playthrough.

Continue reading →

Dev Diary #14: Releasing Upates for an iOS Game Using Gamemaker: Studio

November 4, 2014November 4, 2014 ~ callyscaves ~ 2 Comments

With the recent release of new iPhones and iOS 8, we found ourselves in the position where we had to update our iOS games. If we didn’t, our apps would crash on boot, and even if they did run, we wanted to make sure we custom laid everything out for the new iPhone screen sizes. We had wanted to release updates for Cally’s Caves and Cally’s Caves 2 for a long time, but held off because we weren’t 100% sure how to do it, and updating player save data was intimidating. Faced with the prospect of having our apps pulled, we buckled down and got our updates done. Our process was probably unconventional, but we thought we would share how we did our updates for iOS without losing players’ save games in the process. So, let’s begin.

Saves

The way we handled saving variables across play sessions in Cally’s Caves and Cally’s Caves 2 was the most basic way you can save things using Gamemaker: Studio. We created an .ini file and had the game save variables that we wanted to keep saved in the file. For example, say the player levels Cally up and increases her max hitpoints to four. We don’t want that player to come back for their next play session and have their max hitpoints be three, right? So after they level up, we open the .ini document in a line of code, save that variable (global.maxhp = 4), and then close the .ini document. The next time the player starts the game, the global.maxhp value is read from the .ini document, so they will start with 4 max HP. It’s a really simple system that you can find in the GM:S help.

Continue reading →

Development Diary #7: Art!

March 11, 2014 ~ callyscaves ~ Leave a comment

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 →

Cally's Caves

Level Up Everything

2d art