We just released our first trailer for Cally’s Caves 2… Here it is!
iphone
Cally’s Caves 2 OST now available on Bandcamp!
Since we had wrapped up our soundtrack work on Cally’s Caves 2, we figured we might as well put it up on Bandcamp and see what happens! We will be linking to the Bandcamp in a “support the developers” tip in the game. It’s pretty much our “donate” button for Cally’s Caves 2, since the game will be totally free. Enjoy the tunes, and if you like them, there’s 21 full tracks for only 3 dollars. Also, if you don’t want to pay, there’s always our Soundcloud, which has a decent number of the tracks available for free.
Development Diary # 10: Implementing Feedback from the Beta
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.
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
Cally’s Caves 2: Development Diary #9 – Getting Ready for Testing
Putting something you crafted into someone else’s hands is a harrowing experience. When that person’s gaze locks onto the object you created, a shift happens. What was once your private project is no longer your own, and a singular experience becomes shared one. It can be amazing or terrifying, but either way you will walk away from that shared experience with an idea of how you could have approached your creation differently. The beauty of game development is you can choose to incorporate the feedback you gain from sharing your creation with others before your product is finalized. This is why we have dedicated a two-month period to beta testing Cally’s Caves 2. In today’s Dev Diary we will discuss how we have approached the 8-week beta test period of our game’s development, and what we hope to gain from putting Cally’s Caves 2 in the hands of playtesters.
Cally’s Caves 2 Development Blog #8 – More on Level Design in a 2D game
We already posted on some of the thoughts behind the level design in Cally’s Caves 2 a while ago. In the time since that blog came out we’ve made a number of crucial decisions regarding how the levels will be laid out. Also, the overall level design is such an important part of developing a 2D game that we figured it would be worth another post to discuss some of the decisions we’ve made. We’ve already written about how we approach tutorials, the smaller level sizes, and increasing density of objects in a level, so this time we are going to focus on the smaller things that go into making a level for Cally’s Caves 2.
Hazards
A good 2D platformer should always be fun to run and jump around in. Player movement mechanics are incredibly important, and part of developing player movement is figuring out how the player’s interaction with the environment works. If the player stands on a brick block, they shouldn’t fall through it. If the player runs into a wall, horizontal movement should stop. Basic stuff, right? But if that’s all there is to the game, it might get a bit boring after a while (although plenty of games don’t, and are awesome). Introducing hazards allows a designer to inject some danger into a level design, which helps keep the player on their toes. It also increases the reward value for a player when they beat a level. Would a player feel more satisfaction if they ran down a level that was designed like a hallway, or if they navigated through a maze-like level filled with spikes and lava pits? We believe the latter provides more opportunity for player satisfaction, although there isn’t an objectively correct answer.
Development Diary #7: Art!
Today’s Dev Diary is written by Yal, who is one of the two artists working on Cally’s Caves 2 (along with OHKO). She shares some of her experiences and insights into the process of creating art for a 2d platformer.
A guest article? Does that mean… there is a guest?! Um, well, yeah. Long story short: OHKO asked me whether I was interested in helping out doing some weapon graphics for Cally’s Caves 2. I said yes. Done, stop yawning. Now let’s change subject to the actual graphics! =]
Since a large majority of all AAA games released nowadays are FPS games, it’s only natural that they use guns. The problem is, most of them also try to be vaguely realistic, which in turn means all weapons are of the type “fires bullets in a straight line”. Now how fun is that? This also generally results in unbalanced weapons, since if all weapons fire in a straight line, why bother getting more than one? The answer is: because every new weapon is tons better than the previous one, so why bother keeping that anyway?
Contrast that with a game like Cave Story by Studio Pixel:
(Official screenshot from the game manual) Continue reading
Development Diary #4 – On Level Design in a 2d Game
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.
Cally's Caves 