I’ve decided to write a weekly development diary about the process of making Cally’s Caves 2.  I’m doing it mostly as a design tool to help me reflect upon decisions I’ve made while designing the game, with the hope that it will help me think about the ideas from another perspective and help me create the best game I possibly can.  So it’s a personal tool, but if you read it and enjoy it, it certainly can’t hurt!  To begin, here’s a bit of background:

In June 2013, having quit my day job, I decided to try and make a video game with my good friend Dave.  The main barrier we faced in this venture was that neither of us had any experience in game design.  Sure, I had programmed some little bits of software on my Commodore 64 as a kid, but nothing resembling a full game, and that was 20 years ago.  Inspired by the likes of Tom Francis and Steve Gaynor, who both made amazing independent games (Gaynor had experience but left a big company to make a solo game, and Francis had no experience but kept his day job and learned how to do it at night), I enlisted Dave and we set out on the path.  By October we had finished Cally’s Caves, and released it on the iOS Appstore.  There’s no need to get into the thought process behind the design decisions we made here, but since its release we’ve had 7000 downloads and although we didn’t make any money, it was a personal success for us both – we proved to ourselves that we could ship a game.

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