Our continued absence in communication will have undoubtedly raised some questions. And it is high time we give some answers.
But first the important bit; we are still alive and kicking!
In fact, you could argue we are slightly more alive than before, almost 2 months ago my son Jonas was born. He's doing his job as a small baby perfectly; he's growing like crazy and is highly effective at keeping his new dad away from is laptop. I'm sure he'll soon get the hang of game-development and will proof to be a great asset. But unfortunately at the moment he is not a net contributor.
For the others it has been a challenging year too. One of us has was forced to take some time away from the project. And spread out between the remaining team members, there have been more than a few sick kids and other family members to take care of. And most sadly, in one case even the loss of a close relative.
Being a parttime game developer can be difficult at the best of times, but over the past 5 months it has proven impossible at times for us to contribute as much as we want to. Last weekend we managed to meet up for the first time and months and renewed our pledges to ourselves and the game. And perhaps most importantly, we restated our enthusiasm about Caromble!.
Meeting every Friday as we used to has proven elusive, and the alternative of doing only remote work has not been as productive as hoped. So we made a new deal of meeting one weekend day every month, besides the remote work. That should give us the continuity we are looking for.
As a consequence there might be less updates on Steam Community however. Instead of the 'regular' weekly post we'll infrequent updates here. If we are slow to respond to a question on the forum (we don't get a notification for a new discussion... ) feel free to shoot an email to info at caromble.com.
In the mean time, out of the limelight work is still ongoing! Bossfights are being prepped and crates are being stacked. Thomas S is still cranking out new assets to be put in levels. We are still working on the narrative part of Caromble!. So please give us some time, and we'll 'soon' give you more Caromble!.
Caromble! Friday #426 - Happy spring!
As an alert reader you might have noticed a slight dip in the frequency of these posts. We may have missed one or two (alright 11) Fridays.
We are unhappy about this lapse. We are part-time developers and there are times when personal and professional lives interact heavily with what should be Caromble! time. It is something that happens from time to time, and every time we see that after a while Caromble! gets our attention again. We might be gone from behind our keyboards from time to time, but Caromble! is never from our minds and hearts.
But as the winter of 2018 is ending and a new spring is beginning it is also time to have a quick peak at the buds of another Caromble! spring. Don't judge, spring clichés are fine at the end of winter.
Our next release (no dates right now) will focus almost completely on Chapter 5. If our development speed picks up we will look at other stuff too. Besides 4 new story levels Chapter 5 will bring a new Arkatron too. What it will do exactly will be kept under wraps for the time being, but I can share a development screenshot. It doesn't show any of the cool new ideas we are working on, but we will save those for another time!
And another one, the graphics are still in the early stages, but see if you can spot the new Arkatron:
We'll keep you updated on our steam page as we continue working on Caromble!.
Caromble! Friday #436 - Happy spring!
As an alert reader you might have noticed a slight dip in the frequency of these posts. We may have missed one or two (alright 11) Fridays.
We are unhappy about this lapse. We are part-time developers and there are times when personal and professional lives interact heavily with what should be Caromble! time. It is something that happens from time to time, and every time we see that after a while Caromble! gets our attention again. We might be gone from behind our keyboards from time to time, but Caromble! is never from our minds and hearts.
But as the winter of 2018 is ending and a new spring is beginning it is also time to have a quick peak at the buds of another Caromble! spring. Don't judge, spring clichés are fine at the end of winter.
Our next release (no dates right now) will focus almost completely on Chapter 5. If our development speed picks up we will look at other stuff too. Besides 4 new story levels Chapter 5 will bring a new Arkatron too. What it will do exactly will be kept under wraps for the time being, but I can share a development screenshot. It doesn't show any of the cool new ideas we are working on, but we will save those for another time!
And another one, the graphics are still in the early stages, but see if you can spot the new Arkatron:
We'll keep you updated on our steam page as we continue working on Caromble!.
Caromble! Friday #425 - Happy New Year!
This year Caromble! will leave Early Access for its full release and we are very excited!
It cannot be stressed often enough that we are very grateful to all the players that support us! Particularly those who take the time to provide feedback and help us to make Caromble! a better game!
For those wondering what keeps us from releasing right now, these are the main features that are still on our roadmap:
Chapter 5 story levels
Chapter 6 story levels
Additional skill levels
Background story
Happy gaming in 2018!
-- Crimson Owl Studios
Caromble! Friday #419 More work, and help us win an award!
So much work, and only one Friday per week! After the Caromble! Weekend last week was a bit slowish on the Caromble! side. We are currently working on a couple of things; a new video explaining where we are in Early Access (spoiler: quite far), extending the way we tell the story of Caromble! in-game and making progress on the gameplay of chapter 5.
Our (perhaps overly optimistic) goal is to have Chapter 5 as good as finished by the end of the year. That may be optimistic, but we are making good progress. It is a bit too early to really share a lot about what we have done. But we can share that we are really happy with how the levels are becoming!
Oh and almost forgot, Caromble! is part of the Steam Autumn Sale! Get it now for 30% off.
And please don't be shy in nominating Caromble! for a Steam Award, we have personally (in all modesty of course) voted for ourselves in the category: 'Labor of Love'. Any further votes would be appreciated!!
Caromble! Friday #418: Caromble! Weekend
Last week we had a Caromble! Weekend! This meant we could work together for two days in real life without interruptions.
Day 1 started of with P***** being late and him having his breakfast during our morning stand-up. Just like the old times! Following the release of Chapter 4 we continued our work on our next milestone... Chapter 5! As friends we also paid some attention to the social aspects. As we all know, food and drinks equals fun times. So we had pizza for lunch, Vietnamese spare ribs for dinner and some beers at the end of the day.
Our improvised office for day 1
Day 2 was at our most familiar environment. The attic of Thomas D. It was a cold and rainy day. This provided a perfect background for concentration, hot coffee and hard work.
This weekend gave us a jump start towards our next milestone. We try to continue our work as energetic as this weekend felt!
Happy gaming!
Big content update! Chapter 4, a tower defense level and many, very many improvements
Great news! A new major update for Caromble! has been released. Besides many bug fixes, game features and general improvements, this release mainly brings you Chapter 4 and a new skill level: Defender.
With these 4 new story levels we move out of the industrially themed chapters from before and we introduce a new theme: "The Neon City".
With the latest claimed Arkatron chapter 4 unlocks the power of switches, which allows for more puzzle-based gameplay.
In the skill level Defender we provide you with a crazy breakout-tower defense mashup. Crazy stuff! We are still amazed with how much there is still possible with the brick breaker mechanic and we are very curious of what you think of the new content.
Another big feature we are happy to bring to you is the support for Steam Leaderboards. To celebrate, we started a competition about which you can read in the previous announcement.
Below you can find the full list of features, improvements/tweaks and bugs, but first we want to thank you –the community– for all your valuable feedback. Thanks to you we can try to make Caromble! the best game it can be.
This is the reason why we chose to do Early Access and we're still very happy to have gone this path. Here are a few examples of feedback from players which we used to improve Caromble!:
Steam user MrInvizible
Feedback "Hi Team. Love what you did with 3-1, boss fight, with the backwards facing paddles. That's very clever. Is there any chance that could be introduced a bit earlier though, perhaps at the end of the second stage of 3-1."
Action Great idea! This is good game design. Thanks for this lesson. :) We introduce the backwards paddle an area before now.
Steam user TriggerWarning
Feedback "I miss the option to set the Controller sensitivity"
Action We had mouse sensitivity as an option, but somehow forgot that this can be helpful for gamepads too. We added this option now.
Steam user foofaraw
Feedback So many things. The last few months it almost felt like foofaraw was part of the team. Thank you foofaraw! We are very very grateful for all of your feedback.
We want to thank everyone who chooses to play Caromble! in its Early Access phase and we want to stress our gratitude for all of your feedback, both positive and negative. We hope you continue to do so and we hope Caromble! is becoming the game you want it to be.
Many thanks and enjoy the new content!
The Crimson Owl Studios team
Features
Chapter 4 with new 4 levels in the new 'Neon City' theme
Steam Online Leaderboards
Introducing Switches allowing for more puzzle gameplay
New skill level: "Defender"
Prologue is updated to make more accessible and a better game mechanic intro
Made the "Mercy Ball" feature more explanatory
Added controller sensitivity to Options
Added controller rumble support
Show percentage of portal in text when incremented
New font rendering making it much smoother and with outlines
Created 4 human babies
Improvements/tweaks
Improved the Cannon controls
Improved the portal graphics
Improved several textures / models
Cam shake a little less extreme
Finished Screen looks a lot nicer
Color variations in blocks for the skill levels
Reiterated all levels to make improvements in gameplay and visual appearance
Improved ambient occlusion
Support steam user names with non-ASCII characters
Bugs
Fixed issues where the game would not start for some players
Fixed ramp issue where balls didn't reach the other side
Fixed levels where the score particles moved into the ground
Fixed bugs with our slowmotion and screen effects where the base setting was not reset correctly
Fixed bug where an extra ball powerup combined with charged paddle launched the ball into the air.
Fixed boss head animation glitch
Fixed issue where scores were deleted
Fixed issue where GUI was still partially visible after animating it away
Fixed issue where progress was lost after mercy ball
Fixed issues with controllers through steam link
Fixed issue where ball could go in random direction when hitting a wall exactly head-on
COMPETITION: Get the global high-score for the Level 1.1 and WIN a Caromble! Key
Competition
To celebrate that we now support Steam Leaderboards we have decided to hold a competition. The lucky member of the community to hold the global high-score by next Friday (October 27) at 13:00 CEST will receive a steam key for Caromble!.
Why give away a key for a game you already have? Well its obvious really, the winner of the competition will need a bigger challenge, so he/she can give the key away to a new contender!
Rules:
The person ranking highest for score on the global leaderboard for Level 1.1 by 1300 CEST October 27 2017 will win the competition.
Should there be a draw, all players with that score win.
Should one of the devs hold the highest score (we might feel inclined to challenge you) we will post the prize key as a reply in this post. First come, first served.
That's it. Good luck and remember, using charge and spin will give you much higher scores.
It's been a while since we last posted here. No worries, we're still hard at work getting the next release out of the door!
In fact, we are almost done testing chapter 1 - 4 to make sure everything works as it should. When that's out of the way and all game-breaking bugs are fixed we'll release chapter 4!
We also had a meeting to discus the next chapter (5). We're planning to release that to you around the end of the year.
Sorry for the long wait but the next big update is coming very soon!
Cheers!
Caromble! Friday #404 No pun intended
Even for a stubborn skeptical person such as me it is sometimes hard to deny a certain super-natural tendency in the way things play out. Due to holidays, and the good old 'huh-is-it-my-turn-again', we almost didn't have a Caromble! Friday #404. Page not found… But of course it could also just be that our brains are so hard-wired to find patterns, and perhaps even patterns that don't exist. My inner skeptic just won't let me write a paragraph like this without that disclaimer…
Anyway, with the holidays and all, we can perhaps be forgiven for having a bit of a slow week. Weeks do get slow Caromble!-wise easily being part-time developers and all. It just takes a single day of being a bit under the weather, and boom no productivity for a week. Especially in the Holiday season that means that things can get slow quickly.
So what did happen… Well we made some progress in our effort to tell the back story of the game. We got a new version of the storyboard, and are working with that.
Personally I did some work on the planning towards the final release. Deciding on what will fit in the scope of the game is a continuous and difficult process.
As a gamer (which we of course also are) you never know what features, ideas, extra levels and effects didn't make the cut. You either like or dislike a game. Of course you might have feelings like, 'this game would be even better with multiplayer', or great level ideas. But that is not the same as missing a feature. You will definitely notice when a game feels 'off' or when it simply isn't fun. Or when it feels rough and unfinished of course. But when it feels good, but could have been even beter… You just will never know.
As a developer, your game is never finished. There is always one more level to make. Every effect can be made even nice. The balance of the game could always be tweaked a liiitle bit tighter. There might always be another FPS to be gained on a particular system.
So I guess you will always feel like you are releasing something that is in some abstract way unfinished. The witness feels like a perfectly polished game, but who knows how many things Jonathan Blow cut out that we'll never hear of?
So that is our devil's dilemma. We want to made a great game. We have been going at it for like 8 or 9 years. But we also want to release it. We have made estimates in the past and gloriously missed them, because there was always something more to add. So I guess it is time to end this cycle and finally decide on when will be done.
