games

Dev Diary #23: Choices, Choices

~ callyscaves ~ 8 Comments

How do we create a new game in the Cally’s Caves series that feels fresh and changes things up?  The first 3 games in the series were very light on story, and although we were able to plant some seeds for future story ideas, we could take the plot for Cally’s Caves 4 anywhere.  This dev diary will go over some of the decisions we’ve made to make Cally’s Caves 4 stand apart from our previous games.

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Setting

All 3 Cally’s Caves games took place in “the Caves,” a place that started in Cally’s backyard and gave us a good amount of variety to work with.  The story of Cally’s retaking of the Caves has now been told, and we want to take the environments in Cally’s Caves 4 in some new directions.  Instead of taking place in one interconnected Cave system, Cally’s Caves 4 takes place all across the globe, in facilities owned by the Golden Skull Society (more on the G.S.S. later).

Capture

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Cally Discord & the Painter’s Apprentice

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We are working so hard on Super Cally’s World right now!  Currently, we are working on enemy implementation, and are fleshing out the last few systems that we have yet to code/design into the game.  Over the next months, as more art gets plugged into the game, we will get back to posting weekly #screenshotsaturday’s and more specifics about the game.  In the meantime, you can join the Cally Discord to keep up with what’s going on.

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Also, our friends Luminosity Inc, LLC. are doing a Kickstarter and Greenlight for their game, the Painter’s Apprentice!  The nice folks at Luminosity have been a really positive influence to us over the years we’ve been doing game development, and we want to help spread the word about the Painter’s Apprentice as much as possible.  So if you see fit, please throw them a vote on Greenlight, or a few dollars on Kickstarter, and help make their #indiedev dreams come true!

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

~ 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.

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

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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.

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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.

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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

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

Happy One-Year Anniversary, Cally

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Hey everyone,

Well it’s now been a year since the original Cally’s Caves was released, and sixteen months since we set out on this journey to make games.  Thank you to every one of the 20,000 people that downloaded and played our little free game!  If you’ve never checked it out, we have lots of dev logs on our experience making the game, and you can download Cally’s Caves here for free.  Here’s to many more Cally-versaries!

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Dev Diary #13: Cally’s Caves 2 Postmortem

~ callyscaves ~ 10 Comments

Well, it has now been about 75 days since we released Cally’s Caves 2, and we figured it was about time to write an article about our experience since the game came out.  If you missed it, we got an awesome PlayPressers Trailer, and some attention from some media.  It was all wonderful, but this article is about the stats so let’s just get right into it.

Downloads

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We currently have 131,000 free downloads after two and a half months.  It was way more than we expected to get, and our team feels incredibly lucky to have reached that many people.  To many game developers, 131,000 is nothing, especially considering that Cally’s Caves 2 is free game.  To us, however, it has far exceeded our highest hopes.  When we first started working on Cally 2, we set a lofty goal of getting a hundred thousand downloads to try and grow our name and build an audience.  It was the kind of goal you set because you know it’s so high you’ll never hit it, but the act of aiming for it will make your product better in the end.  The fact that we actually reached and exceeded it is a dream come true. Continue reading →

Development Diary #11: Making a Trailer

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We just posted our first trailer for Cally’s Caves 2, and since we were figuring it out as we went along, nothing seems more appropriate than a dev diary on how we made it.  You can use it as a cautionary tale, or get some tips that may be useful for your trailer, it’s really up to how you judge our final product.

Background

When we made the trailer for the first Cally’s Caves game, we used a very popular screen recording software called Fraps to capture our footage.  We then used an editing software named Proshow Producer to edit the clips together and make our trailer.  While this was a decent way of doing it, we had problems with the overall video quality.  Fraps recorded high quality footage, but when we stitched together the .avi files that Fraps makes, then rendered the project again in Proshow Producer, there was a severe decline in video quality.  Add Youtube’s compression to the mix and we ended up with a pretty grainy trailer, as you can see for yourself above.

One thing we think worked out nicely for the Cally’s Caves trailer was how the footage was edited to the music, and ramped up as it went along.  We knew we could use some of the techniques we had learned making that trailer and make the trailer for Cally’s Caves 2 way better.

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