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.

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