Cally’s Caves 4 development is proceeding at a furious pace, and we recently had a chance to revamp the way our start screen works. Our first game’s start screen was simply a logo on a black screen, and with each successive game in the Cally series, we want to improve every aspect of the game. In this dev diary, we will outline the method we used to create the Cally’s Caves 4 start screen.
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.
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
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.
Well, we’ve been approved by Apple, and the game is finally about to launch. Our release date is next Tuesday, July 1st, and the game will be available completely free. Here are some gifs to celebrate!
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
Cally's Caves 