indie game

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 # 10: Implementing Feedback from the Beta

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Sorry it’s been a while since our last update! It’s crunch time for Cally’s Caves 2, which means we are spending a ton of time polishing, bug fixing, and getting ready to submit to Apple. In our last post we detailed how we hoped our Beta test would go, and at this point we have wrapped up the testing phase.  It didn’t last the 8 weeks we planned on, it actually only took about 2 weeks to receive feedback from all of our testers.  We thought it would be a good time to discuss the feedback we received, and how we are using it to make our game a lot more user-friendly and fun.

Screenshot 2014-05-03 15.56.53

The Testers

We ended up having 15 people beta test Cally’s Caves 2, which doesn’t seem like a lot, but for an indie developer like us, it was a gold mine of useful information.  I put a post up on my personal Facebook and Twitter pages, and the testers all volunteered from there.  Of all the testers, only 2 people tested the game on iPad, 5 people used iPhone 5 or 5s, and the rest were on the older iPhone 4 or 4s models.  We were lucky to have a wide range of devices testing the game, and that’s mostly just due to luck with who signed up.  We also (as detailed in our pre-beta dev diary), sent out an introduction package and survey with the beta files, which most of the people filled out.  It also helped to have my phone near me, as testers would often text me the bugs, which I would then add to my to-do list.  We did have people report quite a few bugs, which was amazing because we may have never found them if we were testing the game ourselves. Continue reading →

Development Diary #2: Art Style

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The art in Cally’s Caves was done entirely by my good friend Dave in an open-source pixel art editor called Aseprite.  Well we were very happy with the art as a first effort – Dave taught himself how to do it in just a few short months – there’s always room for improvement, and some of our reviews commented on the art in a not-so-positive way.  I know that with Cally 2 it is incredibly important to have the art be amazing, and comparable to the best art on any iOS game, in order to have the best chance at success.  Things evolved naturally when Dave moved to a different city and let me know that he probably wouldn’t have enough time to do the art on another game (he will be staying on in a design/level editor capacity).

New Icon 144x144

I posted on the TIGsource forums about looking for a pixel artist for Cally’s Caves 2, linking the first game and hoping and praying someone would answer and want to collaborate with me on the game.  Enter Pablo, an artist who emailed me asking if the position was open and sending me a portfolio of some of his work.  I instantly jumped at the opportunity, recognizing his work as exactly what I was looking for.  The first actual work he sent me for Cally’s Caves 2 was this promo image, which you may have seen before on this blog:

Image

Continue reading →