Gamedev Detox
This past week has been a welcome break after months of working on Caveman Craig for Steam. We’ve been so happy to receive all the positive reviews of the game and Let’s Play videos, and the privilege of having a game on Steam is itself a reward.
For those who’ve been following us over the years, you’ll know that we are not as active as many game developers tend to be. In fact, game development is an after hours thing for us. Tim and I balance full time jobs in I.T Administration and Animation, respectively. On top of that comes family & social life, involvement in the Church, and other hobbies and ventures. Our energy in game development comes in hot bursts, with long cool periods. It’s probably not the right way to run a business, and there’s admittedly an amount of consistency we need to achieve, but that’s what happens when you have 10 fingers and a lot of pies.
I promised myself that following the release of Caveman Craig, I would take a well earned break from game development (with the exception of supporting the game with bug fix updates and public relations) and focus on my still very non-established music vein.
So the past week has felt like a game dev detox, as I perform all the cleaning tasks too menial to bother doing when there was a time-sensitive stack of jobs to do on the computer. Now the house is clean, my brain is clean, and my office is clean and primed for music composition!
Here’s a shot of my game dev office, which doubles as a mini recording studio. Some highlights for those who are interested include…
- Mechanical “DAS” Keyboard. Still works beautifully after many years of service, except the USB hub smells like an electrical fire.
- Windows Surface RT which is capable of doing pretty much zero, but using SplashTop actually works has a handy substitute for a second display. When I need to fill my screen with code or notes, the Surface works nicely as a reference screen – to read a document off, or have a youtube video passively there when I get bored.
- MacBook Pro Retina 15″ – Man, I love Apple laptops. I hate to say it, but if it weren’t for GameMaker, Games, and my DAW of choice, I’d be all Mac. Anyway, having this laptop off to the side is useful for testing Mac builds of games and fiddling with Logic Studio. It also hooks up to the monitor as a second source for when I’m focusing on Mac-related work. Plus I take it around with me everywhere I go.
- The desk – the main desk is a simple but elegant unit from OfficeWorks, so nothing special. The desk raiser on which I sit my display & studio monitors (and under which I store bits and pieces) was actually a lucky find at work which was no longer needed, and it fits nicely with the desk. The space on the main desk usually houses a bunch of tablets that we use for testing apps, or the MIDI keyboard if I need to get more hands on with it & the DAW.
So what’s next for Parabox?
Years ago we announced that we’d decided on some new projects – Nightbear and Stadium Builder. Nightbear had some concept art put together and we had many conversations about the design of the game, but the teddy was ultimately shelved because we realised we had to approach it from a different angle. Meanwhile, Stadium Builder had gone some way as you might have seen on youtube years back, but then we lost the project files amidst technical difficulties. Some progress had been made to get that project running again.
These games are still interesting ideas for us, and over the past few years we’ve also toyed with other concepts. Tim and I will need to meet sometime soon to work out the future of Parabox. We need to reconcile the gap between what we love making, what we have time for, and what is feasible as a business.
And we’ll endeavour to keep you informed along the way!
-Rhys
CAVEMAN CRAIG now available on Steam!
Our flagship game, CAVEMAN CRAIG: THE TRIBES OF BOGGDROP, is now available for Mac & Windows through Steam!
Purchase the game within the first week for a 15% discount, bringing it down to just $9.34 USD.
CAVEMAN CRAIG is a remastered version of Caveman Craig 2, featuring re-imagined levels, new dinosaurs, co-op, and a list of improvements we can’t begin to count!
Check out the recent Let’s Play that I did with my mate Nat.
Own Caveman Craig 2?
If you already own the older game, Caveman Craig 2, you are eligible to receive a Steam key for Caveman Craig: The Tribes of Boggdrop (don’t let the names confuse you – Caveman Craig: The Tribes of Boggdrop is a new, remastered version of Caveman Craig 2).
To register for a Steam key, please .
One more sleep!
Caveman Craig will be available for purchase on Steam tomorrow!
We’re offering a 10% launch discount, making it feel like a bargain at under $9.99 USD (But seriously, it’s worth it)!
If you haven’t already, add Caveman Craig to your wishlist here!
We are very excited, but also so tired after months of late nights and meeting unreasonable deadlines (which we put on ourselves, so I guess we can’t complain). A couple of weeks ago, I took a break from all the lines of code and heartless BETA testing and actually played Caveman Craig, recruiting my real life caveman friend, Nat, and playing co-op! Check it out, you might learn some new things about the game!
A big thank you to everybody who helped make this possible. To our pre-launch party testers, our BETA testers, our friends & family, the Greenlight supporters, and last but not least our faithful fans! It means a lot to us to hear your stories of playing Caveman Craig since its conception in 2008 and beyond.
Bring on tomorrow!
-Rhys & Tim
Hello August!
August is going to be a great month for Parabox Games 
As you all should know, Caveman Craig is coming to Steam this month! Caveman Craig is a ‘remastered’ version of Caveman Craig 2, with split-screen co-op, re-imagined levels (plus a new one), Steam integration, and more.
A big thank you to our squad of BETA testers who are sinking their teeth into the game already and spitting out all sorts of bugs and glitches they’re coming across. Thankfully, so far 90% of the reports were an error that I was able to fix over the weekend in a new update.
Our BETA keys are now exhausted, so we can’t offer any more out. Sorry, you had to act fast! If you owned Caveman Craig 2, you are still eligible for a free copy of Caveman Craig once it is released.
There’s a lot of work still to be done on the game, and Tim and I have put together a roadmap of when the final features and fixes are expected to be rolled out.
Everything is going along swimmingly, so it’s time to ‘lock in’ a release date! We have decided to stick a pin on August 28! So add Caveman Craig to your wishlist on Steam if you haven’t already, and BETA testers… pressure’s on!
-Rhys
Caveman Craig BETA Program Invite
Hey everybody!
The pun is inexcusable, but we are “full Steam ahead” with the upcoming release of Caveman Craig. If you’ve been following us on twitter, we posted a few weird screenshots of our BETA testing experiences over the weekend.
You should soon see the game details on the Steam store, and more details will arrive soon after on pricing, dates, and so on.
We do have a sort-of unfortunate announcement regarding the BETA program mentioned in our previous post. While we would love to provide early BETA access to everyone who owns Caveman Craig 2, we found out that it’s frowned upon and not always allowed by Valve, for a mass distribution of BETA keys.
So instead, we are offering any purchasers of Caveman Craig 2 to ‘opt in’ to the BETA program. We only have a limited number of spots, and our schedule is really tight! So if you are interested in working closely with us to make Caveman Craig as awesome as it can possibly be, please opt in using the Google Form!
CAVEMAN CRAIG: THE TRIBES OF BOGGDROP – Coming to Steam in August!
Parabox Games are excited to announce that, following Caveman Craig 2 being greenlit on Steam, we will be releasing a revamped, refreshed, and updated adventure with our hero, titled Caveman Craig: The Tribes of Boggdrop, or simply Caveman Craig for short. We plan to release Caveman Craig in August, 2015!
Caveman Craig will include a grokkload of new features and improvements, including the long awaited and embarrassingly over-delayed Dudu Forest DLC!
“Wait.. what?? Didn’t you release Caveman Craig 2 like.. 3 years ago?”
That’s correct, we did! And Caveman Craig is, as far as our existing fanbase is concerned, simply an overhaul of Caveman Craig 2, but with a new name. Our chore-list for a Steam release got so long, that we realised we’re releasing a sort of reboot. Branding this reboot as simply Caveman Craig allows the game to stand on its own two feet and attract our new Steam market.
“Ok – so what are the new features in Caveman Craig?”
If you’ve already bought & played Caveman Craig 2, here are some features that may be particularly interesting to you..
- Engine Overhaul - The game has been ported to GameMaker: Studio from GameMaker 8 for massive performance benefits, plus making a number of other new features possible and fixing a number of crashes that were caused by the ageing GM8 engine with newer machines.
- Sound Engine Overhaul - Better positional audio, dynamic effects, new & replaced sound effects. plus an expanded soundtrack by Ricky Garcia.
- Graphics Engine Improvements - Better scaling, new lighting/shader engine, tweaked animations, and m
ore! - Support for Mac OS X – Native and full support for Mac OS X! Play Caveman Craig and wear a scarf!
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Dudu Forest DLC - Included by default in Caveman Craig will be our long-awaited Battle at Dudu Forest DLC. Featuring:
- A whole new Conquest level with a new dinosaur, playable character / enemy, and other secrets..
- Unique challenges and unlocks added throughout the campaign. Harvest mushrooms, collect the rare colourful Scansoriopteryx feathers, or find the long lost tablets of caveman wisdom and literature!
- New achievements and unlocks, including some really stupid cheats!
- Multiplayer - Invite your friend over to your house like we did in the 90s and play Conquest or Survival mode in 2 player split-screen co-op! Requires a game controller (PlayStation or Xbox controllers are good)
- Custom Games – Play a customised game of Conquest or Survival mode – make it super hard, super easy, or super weird!
- Gameplay and control improvements - Dinosaur behaviour improvements, improved HUD and learning curve, and heaps more – too many to list!
- Steam only features - Friend leaderboards for various game statistics, Steam achievements, Profile and game save sync over Steam cloud.
“I already own CC2! Do I have to buy Caveman Craig? Wasn’t the DLC meant to be free?”
Do not fear! Caveman Craig will be free for existing owners of Caveman Craig 2. In fact, if you own a copy of the game, we would like to warmly invite you to participate in our BETA program on Steam. More details on this to come soon..
We want to thank our long term fans for their continued support of the Caveman Craig franchise. It is so exciting to bring the game to a new market, and breathe new life into our game.
(re)Launch Party!
Last week, we ran a ‘re-launch’ BETA testing party. This was very similar to our ‘pre-launch’ party back in 2012, but of course stress-testing the new features in Caveman Craig and evaluating its potential on the Steam platform.
Caveman Craig is now in the hands of a number of private testers, and we are on the final stretch to release!
The day was a massive success, at least in our eyes – the testers diligently entered issues into a bug tracker *cough* google spreadsheet over 8 hours of playtime. There were some pretty major bugs and errors to fix up, but that’s what a BETA test is for!
Over 200 issues were entered throughout the day – but this includes duplicates and suggestions.
The buggiest part of the game was saving & loading – which presented a catch 22 to players. Do we save our game and risk losing our progress if it crashes during the save? Or do we take another risk in playing through the whole level without saving? This caused a fair bit of frustration amongst the testers.. which was unfortunate but showed how invested they were in the game.
We setup split-screen co-op on the big screen, for people to take turns playing together. Working together to take down the enemy proved to be lots of fun!
Some other key areas to test included..
- Mac OS X – Ran almost flawlessly!
- Steam leaderboards and achievements – It was heaps of fun comparing our scores with other players in the room.
- New dudu forest level – presented a unique challenge, that many spent lots of time on. The level is beautiful and serene, with a fantastic celtic soundtrack by Ricky Garcia.
Co-op on the big screen! The way multiplayer should be..
We had a couple of game developers and professional testers with us, and there was no shortage of merciless, brute force testing of the game. One managed to get a ridiculous tribe size before crashing the game..
And now, it’s time for me to shift gears entirely and complete some contractual app development work. After pouring every spare hour into Caveman Craig for the past month, a well deserved break is going to do me and the game some good. We can’t wait to release the game, and after some meetings and plans, we will be excited to announce something more official very soon.
Regards,
Rhys
May’s Etc
The new face of the savage land of Boggdrop
Dev Update
This past week or two have been big ones for me – working every weeknight and all through the weekends to keep on schedule. I’ve been playing with the new lighting engine of choice – a modified version of prettylight by Nik Sudan. It looks even better than in Caveman Craig 2, and has the added benefit of a gaussian blur shader which we’ll use sparingly for a layer of polish. It looks especially pretty in the main menu, as we blur the background scene when the menu elements appear.
Each level has added unique charm. The new level, originally to be part of DLC, set at Dudu Forest, works a little more like Survival mode as far as dinosaurs go. Rather than having a director ‘unleash’ groups of dinosaurs at chosen intervals to provide a crafted pace like most levels, dinosaurs are spawned at random, at any given time. I call it “frenzy” mode, and it will be an option when playing custom games, another feature we’re adding.
We had a lot of feedback about the ending of Caveman Craig 2. The final challenge, in which you lead the other tribe leaders into battle with a family of T-rexes, was an unexpected change of pace from the rest of the game. It was fun, though perhaps implemented poorly. In the new update, the T-rex challenge will become part of the final conquest level against our furry friend, Steve. It’s heaps more fun because you can enlist your entire tribe to take down the nest together, and strategise accordingly.
There’s still a lot to do, and my next big job is to implement Steam leaderboards. The current plan is to include leaderboards for each Conquest level, plus the mini-games. I’m not a big fan of global leaderboards, where seeing the number 1 player in the world only discourages you from bothering to even try. So we’ll be focusing on comparing scores with Steam friends only.
How do you measure how well you played a Conquest level? How quickly you finish it? How much damage you inflict? There are many different ways to play each level , and we want to encourage you to play the game in different ways and be rewarded for it. Each level will have a few standard high score measurements, but there’ll be some unique challenges as well in each level.
(re)Launch Party
Our Steam update is nearing a private BETA release, the commencement of which will be flagged by a Caveman Craig re-launch Party, scheduled in a couple of weeks time. Before we initially released Caveman Craig 2 in 2012, we ran a testing party for a private group of friends. It proved very helpful in ironing out bugs, getting feedback, and generally prepping the game for final release.
With the amount of changes Tim and I have made over the past couple of months, we decided that another testing event was in order. With the use of Steam’s API, testing with a larger group of people is especially necessary to see how well everything works with regards to leaderboards, achievements, cloud sync, and so on.
Soon after the re-launch party, we hope to announce a release date and some more official details about what you can expect in Caveman Craig for Steam.
Development Update – Old school co-op & zombie apocalypses
Hi all!
A development update for Caveman Craig for Steam for you all.
Progress is coming along quite well, and I’ve set myself a deadline for the end of the month to have all the core work done. We’ll then need to spend a few weeks testing, preparing launch material, and configuring the various aspects of the Steam page.
There’s a lot more to Caveman Craig for Steam than a layer of polish and a bunch of bug fixes and tweaks. We’ve added new features – stemming from the Dudu Forest DLC, or features we’ve wanted to implement since the original release in 2012, or new ideas we’ve had while porting the game to Steam.
Each Conquest level will feature a unique challenge to either aid or hinder you in your attempts to conquer the enemy tribe, or provide a secondary goal.
We’ve added some more achievements, and with them come new unlocks. In particular, there’s now a cheats menu where you can activate a number of fun modifiers, ala TimeSplitters, providing you have unlocked them. There are currently 7 cheats, including the “Barno” cheat that you can already unlock in the current version of Caveman Craig 2.
I’ve been going to town with Steam API integration. All the achievements are tied in with Steam’s system. We use Steam cloud to synchronise your game profiles, saved games, and stats between computers. And I soon plan to integrate Steam leaderboards. You’ll be able to compare various statistics and scores from Conquest, Survival, and all the mini-games with your friends (providing they also own the game).
A feature I’m really happy about is the ability to play 2-player co-op on a shared / split screen, old school style! You can play through the Conquest campaign with a sibling or a pal using a game controller (PlayStation, Xbox, etc). This was an experiment, and it proved to be a whole lot of fun. Players can now make cavemen follow them specifically by pressing “F” on the keyboard (or triangle / Y on the game controller) while they are standing over one. I’ve been playing with Tim and other friends – one might be in charge of training gatherers + preparers, the other in charge of training hunters… have one defend the tribe while the other attacks.. or both go all in.
We’re really taking advantage of the sandbox nature of Caveman Craig’s engine with this Steam port, too. Players will be able to start a custom Conquest or Survival game – customising the difficulty, scene, and characters. Personally, I like a game that gives players the freedom to customise it to the point of absurdity or malfunction. I’ll be trying to bring out this nature in Caveman Craig more. For example, last night I accidentally created a zombie apocalypse in one of my play-tests.
Ricky will be expanding the soundtrack to accommodate the new forest level (originally for the Dudu Forest DLC), and to include battle music! Tim will begin significantly redesigning the main menu to support the new levels and features, improving old animations, designing the new characters + dinosaurs, and so on.
Stay tuned!
-Rhys
April’s Etc
Hi guys!
It’s exciting to be productive enough to write another “etc” post here. Although to be honest, it’s just a lazy way of coming up with a title to say “here’s our latest news”.
Caveman Craig 2 for Steam is coming along very well. I’ve spent many evenings and weekends improving the game – a balance of fixing old bugs/glitches, new features and improvements, and most importantly, porting the game to GameMaker Studio. This process has already proven very promising (though time consuming) – the game is much more stable, powerful, functional.. and moving to GMS has paved way for some fun new features which we hope to announce soon. It also means that Caveman Craig 2 runs great on Mac OS X, integrates easily with Steam’s API (achievements, statistics, leaderboards…), and soon we will test the game in Ubuntu as well (but no promises here).
At this point, it’s making more sense for us to ditch the idea of making an interim update/patch to the GM8 version. It would have been a rushed job, and not a reasonable or adequate way to launch the Dudu Forest DLC, nor appropriate use of our time.
What this means for current CC2 owners is that you will need to suffer with any bugs or crashes you are encountering for a little while longer – but the reward for your patience will be greater! I can’t wait to show off some of the stuff we’ve been working on.
That’s all for now. By the way, whenever I’m on a roll I like to tweet my updates. So (and say hi! It’s nice to know I have company) – who knows, I might leak some of the new features on there first..
