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Cally’s Caves 4 Trailer and Release Date!

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We are excited to announce that Cally’s Caves 4 is going to be coming out on iOS in November!  Here is the official trailer:

Cally’s Caves 4 picks up three years after the end of Cally’s Caves 3, with Cally and her friends searching for a cure for Rupert’s Curse.  Cally will set out on a worldwide journey to find “The Amulet of Valerius,” an artifact that she believes can cure Rupert and give him a normal life.  As the story unfolds, Team Cally will uncover the origins of a secret society that controls the world, and meet a new nemesis that threatens to destroy everything that Cally loves.

Features:

  • 320 levels packed with enemies, collectibles and secrets.

  • 11 huge bosses to fight, reason with, and maybe even become friends with.

  • 24 enemy types spanning Regular Game, New Game + and Survival Modes.

  • Costume choices for Cally.

  • The return of Cally’s ninja bear cub friend Bera as a playable character.

  • An in-game wiki to collect information about the story, characters, and enemy behaviors and weaknesses.

  • All-new engine runs at 60fps for better control and visual fidelity

  • New Weapon Mod system that allows you to customize your weapon’s effects.

  • 11 weapon classes, with 88 unique weapon forms (not including modded weapons).  Level your weapons up by using them and experience new, powerful effects!

  • MFi controller is fully supported.

  • A bigger story with new and returning characters.

  • Cally can now strafe and autofire.

  • A new hubworld area with shops to buy Power-ups, Consumables, and Weapon mods with in-game currency.

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

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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.

Screenshot 2015-09-28 18.32.27

This is the biggest update we’ve ever done for a game, and will include a bunch of new features:
Screenshot 2015-09-26 16.46.53

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

Screenshot 2015-10-05 14.52.33(2)

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.

Screenshot 2015-10-02 12.23.41

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.

Screenshot 2015-10-01 13.52.25

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.

melvinszone

Development Diary #17: Tile Systems for 2D Games

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When we started working on Cally’s Caves 3, it was clear that we needed to improve our tile system to give the game a better, more detailed look.  In our previous two games, we used a really simple tile system consisting of 3 tile types; a “path” block, a “fill” block and a “boulder” block.  We used the boulders as our “walls,” and flipped the path block for our ceilings.

Screenshot 2014-06-21 13.25.15

It was a very simple system, and it worked for us at the time.  A couple of months into Cally’s Caves 3 development, however, our artist 0HK0 suggested using a much more complex system to give our game some more visual flair.  The suggested tile system would have two types of walls: environment walls and background walls.  The environment walls tile set consists of 16 block types, and the background walls have 9.  This dev diary will outline exactly how our tile system works, in the hopes that others may find it useful.

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Dev Diary #16: Dealing with iOS Resolutions in GameMaker: Studio

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If someone who has never made a game before decides to try to create one, it seems like it’s going to be pretty simple.  Then that person will have a day – deep into the dev cycle – where they discover a technical requirement they didn’t think about, pull their hair out, and have a nervous breakdown.  When we were working on the original Cally’s Caves, there was a certain day when it dawned on us that we were going to have to account for all the different resolutions that iOS devices use.  It had never occurred to us in the planning phase that we were going to have to make the game work on anything more than one resolution, and it set us back quite a bit while we implemented our strategy.  Thinking back on those days, it seems like it could be a useful exercise to document how we handle the resolutions in specific detail.  We do this in the hopes that some others may come across the article and find it useful when they are dealing with the same issue.

Image Credit: Carst.Me
Image Credit: Carst.Me

Schools of Thought

There are a number of different ways you could handle scaling to different resolutions while developing a game.  Looking at GameMaker: Studio specifically, if you look at the tutorial on resolution scaling, it shows you a method of scaling that allows landscape and portrait mode.  It’s an adaptable scaling method that is run during every single frame of the game.  This is the first school of thought when it comes to resolution scaling on mobile devices: Continue reading →

KatataK Released by our Friends at PixelSpill

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Hello all, we have some dev diaries coming soon for Cally’s Caves 3, but in the meantime we wanted to share some exciting news from our friends across the pond.  PixelSpill is a UK-based game developer that we’ve worked on a few game jams with (See Skylands and Blopathon).  They’ve just released their first game, KatataK on the Appstore in collaboration with the popular Youtuber Tomska.  It’s been so cool to see Twitter blowing up with people talking about KatataK, so join the discussion and go download KatataK today!tumblr_static_tumblr_static_99d9ggkvw5k4os0s8coo0g8ks_1280

Cally’s Caves 3 Announcement!

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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 3 Title Promo

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.

final cally 3 gif

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

~ callyscaves ~ 2 Comments

icon1024x1024

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.

Screenshot 2014-11-04 13.49.00

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.

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