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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 #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

Screenshot 2014-09-18 15.01.02

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 →

Cally’s Caves 2 Media and Discussion Roundup

~ callyscaves ~ 1 Comment

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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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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