Development Diary #17: Tile Systems for 2D Games

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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KatataK Released by our Friends at PixelSpill

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

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

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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.

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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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Original Cally’s Caves 2 Design Document

We were just going through our archives, and we found the original design document we made back in October 2013.  How much did we stick to the original design? The text of the document is as follows:

Cally’s Caves 2

General Plot Synopsis

Intro – told in a series of slide animations

After saving her parents, life returns to normal for young Cally.  One day, as she is browsing Facebook on her phone, she gets a Snapchat from Dr. Herbert showing her parents have been kidnapped AGAIN.  Knowing what she has to do, Cally sets out into her backyard, ready to journey into the caves once more.

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Cally’s Caves 2 Media and Discussion Roundup

So our game has been available for 9 days now, and things are going pretty well. We thought we’d post a bunch of links to the various videos and articles that have popped up since release (and hopefully we will do a blog post on how we approached marketing shortly).

We got talked about on the Toucharcade Podcast.

And mentioned in their weekly release article:

We got talked about on Neogaf 😀

And an awesome review from Appadvice!

Here is a sweet review from SentralGamer.
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