Caveman Craig 2 – ‘Mini Hud’
One issue that Tim and I wanted to fix in Caveman Craig 2 was the ugly looking hud above the cavemen. You have their name (which fades out when it’s over another caveman) and two little icons on either side of them to show what skills they know – and a brain that throbs when they are learning.
To do this, we’ve designed a ‘mini hud’ which only appears on cavemen when your mouse is rolled over them, or when they’re following you. With this hud you can see their health, their progress towards learning their two skills, and their name.
The cool part is that you can prioritise what the cavemen do. In Caveman Craig 1, if you want a gatherer to take berries instead of carcasses, you have to only teach him the berries task so that he ignores the carcasses. In Caveman Craig 2, you can pick which task the gathere should prioritise. If a gatherer prioritises fruit, he will only go for meat if there is no fruit to pick, and vice versa. For hunters, you can pick between prioritising carnivores or herbivores. Furthermore, you can grab fully-trained hunters to follow you and they will attack whatever you attack – team effort!
Below is a diagram showing the mini-hud that we’ve designed. Please tell us what you think, and make any suggestions if you like. Speaking of suggestions, I’ve created a page that you can access on the right if you want to make general suggestions about Caveman Craig 2. This is just so we don’t clutter the blog section with comments about the suggestions. I’ll also put in a list suggestions that have already been made.
Thanks!
Rhys
Second Place!
The results are in, and YoYo Games has determined Caveman Craig @ second place!
Thankyou to everybody who supported Caveman Craig since its release – anything from one small comment to promoting, discussing, suggesting ideas, reporting bugs, etc, helped Caveman Craig reach second place at the YoYo Games’ Ancient Civilisation Competition.
For all the worthy winners and the judges’ review, go here: http://www.yoyogames.com/gamemaker/competition02
Thanks again!
Rhys Andrews and Tim Andrews
Version 1.4 Beta Out
Hi everybody!
Caveman Craig version 1.4 is now available exclusive to the 64Digits mirror. It is a BETA, so I will be taking copious notes of any bug reports or issues, and if necessary, will revise when finally updating the YoYo Games mirror. You can download the game HERE
For a full list of changes, take a look at the changes document here:http://64digits.com/users/RhysAndrews/changes.txt
Enjoy, guys!
Rhys
Glorious Discovery!!
Woo!!
I’ve just discovered some great ways of optimising the code in the caveman AI for Caveman Craig. At the moment, I have 100 cavemen in the room with full 60/60 FPS – prior to the optimisation I had 25/60 FPS after just 40 cavemen.
Don’t expect the same results on every system, as I do have a fairly powerful computer. However, you can confidently expect a 100% increase at the minimum!! Yes, I’m very excited.
Caveman Craig 1.4 will be out as soon as the results are in, or if Sandy gives me permission to update the game prior to the results. I am still making adjustments to fix some glitches with the optimisations but they’re very minor. This, along with a new licence, and difficulty increases, will be available very soon.
-Rhys
Edit 1: Those results aforementioned are for cavemen following me, but not doing their own thing. There is a significant decrease in AI activity when they are just following me. When running around and doing their thing, it starts to lag a bit after about 35 cavemen. However, the lag is much more gradual and thus easy to cope with.
Blog Released!
Hi everybody!
Considering that Tim and I will still be making updates to Caveman Craig, and that we are working on the sequel, here is our blog that covers all information about Caveman Craig, the “press” response, download links, and development log for Caveman Craig 2.
Make sure you save this to your favourites or RSS Feed it or whatever you want to do!
Laterz
-Rhys Andrews
