Hey everyone,
We’ve got some dev diaries coming up, but we’ve been busy working on the Android version of Cally’s Caves 3. It’s finally out now, and available to download here: Cally’s Caves 3 on Google Play.
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.
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.
When 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
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
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’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.
Hey everyone,
Well it’s now been a year since the original Cally’s Caves was released, and sixteen months since we set out on this journey to make games. Thank you to every one of the 20,000 people that downloaded and played our little free game! If you’ve never checked it out, we have lots of dev logs on our experience making the game, and you can download Cally’s Caves here for free. Here’s to many more Cally-versaries!
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!
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 😀
Well, it’s been a pretty crazy week, ending up with Cally’s Caves 2 being talked about on our favorite podcast. It’s pretty surreal to tune into something we listen to every week, only to hear our game talked about!
Here is the link to the Toucharcade article, where you will find the links for whatever you use to listen to podcasts!
With the impending release of Cally’s Caves 2 tonight, here’s a few free promo codes for early access! First come first serve (if you read this). Redeem on the Appstore!
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Sorry about the lack of posts lately. We have finally submitted Cally’s Caves 2 to Apple for review, so we are going to try and get back to posting regularly!
Testing a game on an iOS device seems like it should be a simple process, but we learned the hard way that minor details can complicate things at any time. In this dev diary, we will outline the steps of our testing process using Gamemaker: Studio, in the hopes that it may help some people overcome the same complications that we faced. This entry will be a bit technical and specific.
Note: We are using Gamemaker: Studio version 1.3.1344, and you will need access to a Mac.
1) Get your code ready for mobile.
We were developing a game that uses touch controls, but convenience necessitated being able to test on PC as well. This led to us having 2 control methods, and needing to switch between them. When we needed to export an .ipa file (the file type for iOS applications), we would need to disable the pc controls. We also based our resolution coding for iOS based off of the “display_get_size()” function, but when testing on windows we would use “window_get_size()” for everything to work properly. So, before you export your .ipa file, make sure you have everything ready for the mobile version. Continue reading
Cally's Caves 