ios

Dev Diary #16: Dealing with iOS Resolutions in GameMaker: Studio

~ callyscaves ~ 9 Comments

If someone who has never made a game before decides to try to create one, it seems like it’s going to be pretty simple.  Then that person will have a day – deep into the dev cycle – where they discover a technical requirement they didn’t think about, pull their hair out, and have a nervous breakdown.  When we were working on the original Cally’s Caves, there was a certain day when it dawned on us that we were going to have to account for all the different resolutions that iOS devices use.  It had never occurred to us in the planning phase that we were going to have to make the game work on anything more than one resolution, and it set us back quite a bit while we implemented our strategy.  Thinking back on those days, it seems like it could be a useful exercise to document how we handle the resolutions in specific detail.  We do this in the hopes that some others may come across the article and find it useful when they are dealing with the same issue.

Image Credit: Carst.Me
Image Credit: Carst.Me

Schools of Thought

There are a number of different ways you could handle scaling to different resolutions while developing a game.  Looking at GameMaker: Studio specifically, if you look at the tutorial on resolution scaling, it shows you a method of scaling that allows landscape and portrait mode.  It’s an adaptable scaling method that is run during every single frame of the game.  This is the first school of thought when it comes to resolution scaling on mobile devices: Continue reading →

Dev Diary #15: The Design Phase

~ callyscaves ~ 2 Comments

IMG_21102014_172951When we came to the decision to make Cally’s Caves 3, we knew that we would have to radically rethink many of the gameplay mechanics that were in Cally’s Caves 1 and 2.  One of the biggest benefits of creating a direct sequel is that it gives us an opportunity to do things differently.  We are proud of our first two games, but it’s always helpful to take a step back and try to evaluate what you’ve created from a different perspective.  Then, we can use our experience making the first two games to make Cally’s Caves 3 bigger, and much better.  This Dev Diary will outline many of the design decisions we made during the planning phase of Cally’s Caves 3 development.

Bigger, but not Always

IMG_11122014_171516

Cally’s Caves 1 and 2 were made of art assets that were mostly 32×32 pixels.  We managed to get away with it by zooming in a little bit on the assets, so they appear larger on an iOS screen that 32×32 pixels.  While we are happy to keep going in that direction, we know that we want to have some enemies or bosses that are quite large on the screen.  This presents a unique challenge, as some of the boss sprites are so big, they won’t fit on the in-game screen.  To account for this (and maintain the large size), we decided to implement a better boss introduction mechanic.  When the player first sees a boss, the game camera focuses solely on the boss object, to highlight the size of the sprite, and make sure players get a good look at the boss before the fight kicks in.   Continue reading →

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

Cally’s Caves 3 Announcement!

~ callyscaves ~ 2 Comments

This shouldn’t come as a shock to anyone reading this.  If you finished the bonus levels in Cally’s Caves 2, or follow us on Twitter or Soundcloud, you probably know that we have been working on Cally’s Caves 3 for some time now.  After the wonderful time we had with Cally’s Caves 2, we decided to put the puzzle game we were working on to the side and try to keep the ball rolling with the Cally franchise.  So, what’s in store for Cally on her next adventure?

Cally 3 Title Promo

Cally’s Caves 3 is another chance for us to aspire to make the best platformer on iOS.  We’ve taken a lot of the feedback we received from the first two games and are putting it to use while developing Cally’s Caves 3.  The biggest change is that we are adding a new game plus mode, which will give players a lot more reasons to come back and keep playing.  After finishing the campaign (124 levels or so), new game plus mode will open up.  Another tier of weapon upgrades will open up, leading towards a god-tier final form for each weapon.  Instead of just making new game plus be like the campaign again but harder, we are adding new enemies and weapon types into new game plus, and the one “true” story ending to the game will be at the end of the new game plus playthrough.

final cally 3 gif

Continue reading →

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

~ callyscaves ~ 2 Comments

icon1024x1024

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.

Screenshot 2014-11-04 13.49.00

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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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: The PlayPressers Trailer

~ callyscaves ~ 1 Comment

Recently, a guy by the name of Tyler Williams contacted us about doing a fan trailer for Cally’s Caves 2.  Tyler is the creator of PlayPressers.com, a trailer-making service for aspiring game developers.  Needless to say, we were totally blown away by Tyler’s trailer (it was much better than the official trailer we made for Cally’s Caves 2).  Check out the trailer below, and be sure to check out PlayPressers.com to see more of Tyler’s amazing work!

Original Cally’s Caves 2 Design Document

~ callyscaves ~ 4 Comments

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

~ 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.
Continue reading →