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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.

Development Diary #4 – On Level Design in a 2d Game

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One of the greatest challenges developing Cally’s Caves 2 is how to go about designing 100 levels while keeping the game fresh.  Cally’s Caves had 27 levels, not including boss rooms or the challenge “subrooms.”  At the time, it seemed like a good idea to differentiate each level by the use of music, tile sets, and area names.  Every time you entered a new level, a new song would start playing, and every five levels the environment sprites would change.  While this worked to a certain degree, a large number of players played the first few levels and then gave up (either out of frustration at the difficulty, or just not enjoying the game).  This unfortunately led to a number of the levels and environment sets never being seen.  In retrospect, we may have been better off if we had changed the tile set every level and just rotated the four sets that we had.  Hindsight is 20/20, and having that hindsight doesn’t affect the product we already released.  It does, however, allow us to approach a sequel with the lessons we learned in mind.  Hopefully, using the lessons we learned, we can make the levels in Cally Caves 2 do a lot more for the player.

 

Level 3 of Cally's Caves
Level 3 of Cally’s Caves

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