A look at our workspaces/studio…
Hey guys,
Thought I’d show you something a little different. This is the little home studio with which I create Caveman Craig 2 (and any other games of course)!
[slideshow]
Some details for the geeks…
– Main PC Desktop: Core i7 2.66Ghz, 6GB DDR3 1600Mhz RAM, 9600GT, 24″ Dell Monitor, DAS Mechanical Keyboard, LS1 Mouse
– MacBook Pro: Core i7 2.66Ghz, 8GB DDR3 1066Mhz RAM
– M-Audio FastTrack Pro Recording Interface, M-Audio Keystation 61es MIDI Keyboard Controller
– AudioEngine 5 Powered Reference Speakers
– Diecast model Delorean!
In the next few days I hope to show you a few snaps of our other studios. Stay tuned, as always =]
-Rhys
Jurassic John
Time to meet another Caveman from the upcoming Caveman Craig 2.
This is Jurassic John. Not much to say about him except that he is hairy, sweaty and has a fierce arm when it comes to using his club.
Click here to see the .swf animation.
Enjoy the animation! We will be recording voices and sound FX for the game in the coming week!
Exciting News on the CC2 Front
Hi everyone!
I have been on and off searching for a suitable musician to produce a quality soundtrack for Caveman Craig 2. In the original game, Tim and I whipped up some very basic tribal music just to give a bit of background noise. This time we’re trying to be just a little more ambitious!
We’re very pleased to announce that Ricky Garcia will be composing the OST for Caveman Craig 2. Ricky is a berklee graduate with some impressive credentials: he was the guitarist for platinum selling pop-rock group “LaFee”, and has worked/played with some world class greats – including Jordan Rudess (of Dream Theater) and Steve Vai. Ricky’s making a move into film and video game soundtracks, and we hope that CC2 is the musical canvas he’s been looking for!
We hope to give you some snippets of what will undoubtedly be some epic orchestral sounds in the near future!
You can visit Ricky Garcia’s website here: http://www.rickygarcia.com
Caveman Craig 2 Dev Update
Hi everyone!
Just thought it was about time I give you all a development update on CC2.
Things are going really well. Greg, Tim and myself have spoken a lot about revising some areas of the game to make it more fun in general, really getting into the specifics. We’re doing lots of testing of the alpha builds to iron out bugs and make tweaks to make the game more fun. We’ve added a couple more dinosaurs to the sandbox and are working on balancing them out, too. Thankfully at this point there don’t appear to be any big performance issues to tackle, unlike CC2’s predecessors.
As you can see from the previous blog entry, Tim has designed a number of foe’s for Craig, and will continue to show you more over the coming days/weeks right here in the blog. We hope Tim and Greg will have more material for you soon, too.
Stay tuned!
-Rhys
Meet Neanderthal Neil
Neanderthal Neil
As I mentioned in my previous post, I’d like to introduce you to some new characters that we’ll see in Caveman Craig 2 (to hopefully be released some time this year).
The first rival we will come across is Caveman Craig’s fallen twin brother, Neanderthal Neil.
It is unknown why Craig and Neil no longer get along, but it more than likely involves a brontosaurus sandwich-related dispute. Neanderthal Neil shares identical skills to Craig, and it will be quite a challenge to take down him and his tribe. Just like Craig, his rock-throwing and clubbing know-how will make it hard to defeat the tribe of Neanderthal Neil.
Other facts:
- Neil and Craig both have indentical ‘gatherer’ bags, both received them from their Grandma Goggette when they were 7.
- Neanderthal Neil invented Fluoro
- By defeating Neil, you will be able to play as him in other game modes in CC2.
- Neil won’t be as big in the game as he is shown in this image. Krokk, that would be scary!
The Rivals in Caveman Craig 2…
Hey there! This is my first post!
My name is Tim and I am responsible for all the animation and a fair chunk of the graphics in Caveman Craig 2. Greg Vanderbeek has been doing some wonderful scenery and landscape art too.
The game is really coming together, and I urge you to hang in there and tune into our blog regularly – Caveman Craig 2 is going to be something very special! We know you’ve been waiting for so long.
The main feature in the game will be conquest mode, in which you need to capture checkpoints (see image below) and take over an enemy caveman tribe. We have decided to include 4 unique individual enemies (basically “enemy Craigs” that run the tribe you are against), and I’m going to introduce you to them over the coming weeks… stay tuned!!
This is an upsized example of the capture points located throughout the maps in CC2. To capture a checkpoint, you must throw rocks at the statue's head. Once destroyed, the tribe leader's head (in this case, Craig) will replace the one on there.
TEKA TEKI now available for Android!
Dear all,
Just a quick entry today, to let you all know that Teka Teki is now available on Android for 95 US cents. So if anyone here has an Android phone, spend 95 cents and make me happy =)
-Rhys
PS: New CC2 entries coming soon.
The Strangest of Glitches
Hi all,
Greg has been working dilligently on some beautiful landscapes and other bits and pieces for CC2.
For a while though I thought there were glitches in the way he was rendering the images. Whenever I checked for collisions between the sun and one of his images, the game would lock up / crash. No error message from Game Maker.
But that theory soon vanished as I found that other objects could collide with the images just fine, and that while many sprites did collide with the sun ok, some larger ones, seemingly all with some form of transparency in them, would just lock up the game. Even changing masks in the sun’s object made no difference.
What was even stranger was that at one point, the game would lock up only for a fraction of a second, and then re-appear with a large number of steps processed. So, if Craig was running right at the time of lock up, half a second later the screen would go back into motion, and Craig would be on the other side of the map!
I trial-and-errored all the sections of code in the sun, and none seemed to be the culprit. The only commonality I could find was that it would lock up if the sun collided with an object containing one of many sprites that seemed to affect it (the sun had to check for a collision via an event or via place_meeting for it to lock up – it made no difference what the following action was).
So, how did I overcome this? I created a dummy object to follow the sun around and report to it when [i]it[/i] collided with something. So instead of the sun checking for a collision, it checked if the mask had a collision. And it works fine! But I can’t just continue on without looking back and wondering.. seriously, what the hell is going on?
-Rhys
Sneak Peek at Caveman Craig 2
Hey all!
I thought it were only fair to show you all the progress made on CC2 over the past 4 weeks.. and I’ve posted enough screenshots.
Below is a BETA Gameplay video with some annotation. It doesn’t come close to showing everything the game can do so far, but it should be enough to wet your appetite =)
Regards,
Rhys
A look at how CC2 performs
In the back of my head was a growing concern that I was yet to test CC2 on a budget computer.
Having a Core i7 920 with 6GB of 1600MHz RAM and a 9600GT (ok, the latter isn’t that impressive but it still chews through any game no problem) sounds great, but when it comes to developing games it can actually be a burden. Reason being, it has absolutely no problem running Caveman Craig 2. No FPS drop at all. This makes it much harder to work out what slows it down most should I try it out on another machine and find it does not run very fast.
So, I decided to try it out on my mothers laptop. She has a 2.3GHZ Pentium Dual-Core (this is a chipset below the Core 2 Duo’s), with 2GB of RAM and an integrated Intel graphics chipset. This seems like the ideal ‘base’ spec for CC2. If you have anything lower than these specs, you have an old machine and you’re probably used to things not running brilliantly anyway.
Unfortunately, the game didn’t run completely to my satisfaction, although it certainly wasn’t as bad as it could have been. It ran at a steady 40fps (my target frame rate) when lighting and sun effects were switched off, with approx. 10-13 cavemen (shared between the players and the enemy tribe) active. But with the sun effects on the game quickly sunk to 35fps, and even dipping into 28 from time to time. Ok, time to optimise those sun effects.
Lighting wasn’t as slow as I’d thought either. With it turned on, the frame-rate would occasionaly drop to 39, suggesting it’s sitting just above 40. That might sound just fine, but keep in mind the game is hardly completed and a lot will be added very soon. Still, lighting is a luxury that is probably expected to only work nicely on dedicated graphics.
