Hi Caromblers! This is my (Frank) first time writing a Steam Announcement, so please be gentle ;).
It's been a month now since I joined the team to work on Caromble!. I've mostly been focusing my attention to get our Twitter and Facebook a little more active with more frequent posts and gifs. I'm also looking at other social media platforms to get the word out to people about Caromble!. It would be very helpful to hear what you, our players, are most active on and would like to hear about Caromble!?
In the meantime Pascal has been working hard on level 3 of Chapter 4. We're happy to say that level 3 is now gameplay complete! That means the biggest part of the level is done, what remains is dressing it up nicely and tweaking it to get the right feel. Check some of the level in the screenshot below!
Thomas D has been fixing bugs (and also creating a funny one that you can see in action at the bottom of this post) and made some preliminary sketches of a new screen to showcase your score and time at the end of each level. We're looking at a nice way of showing your score/time and compare it to your (Steam) friends and a global leaderboard.
Raymond is working on a new skill level that's going to be added to the game with the upcoming release of Chapter 4. It's almost at a playable state, so we're going to have some internal playtesting for it soon. Obviously that also means it's a showdown between the team members to settle who's at the top of the leaderboard. Bring it on guys!
Hope everybody had a great year and played wonderful games! We'll be back in the new year, aka next week, with more updates on Caromble!.
Caromble! Friday #376 - All alone with camera transitions and the switch mechanic
Hi friendly gamers,
Last Friday I (Pascal) was working all aloneːsteamsadː Thomas was learning how to drive on slippery roads, Peter and Ray are still very much occupied in the universe of babies and Frank was doing his tweets from elsewhere.
I took this Friday to work on the 2nd level of Chapter 4. It is almost feature complete now and I'm quite happy with it. Check out one of the fancy camera transitions:
Chapter 4 introduces the Switch mechanic, where you (you guessed it right) can hit switches with the ball(s) to activate elements in the level. I played around with this small area in this level by placing switches on strategic positions which asked some puzzling from the player. After playing around I just figured 'more is more' and made this of it. I hope it helps challenging your speedruns:
If you want to see the complete playthrough of the second subarea of this level, you can check out this youtube video. It is a low quality video though. It was meant for making the gifs and my development machine is not fast enough to make good quality videos unfortunately ːsteamsadː
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-gfr3CLiwY
I hope you like what we're doing with Chapter 4. Please let us know your ideas and feedback in the comments, so together we can make Caromble! the brick breaker we have always dreamed of!
Caromble! Friday #375 - Shiny Switchy Particles
Today I (Thomas D) was going to quickly update the particle effect that was played when switches activate and then work one of the chapter 4 levels. Of course I spend all day tweaking the effect. I'm quite happy with how it turned out, although I have some more ideas about the effect and I might tweak a bit more over the weekend.
Caromble! Friday #374 - Introducing Frank and a request for your support
His name is Frank
We have been working on Caromble! for over 7 years already. 7 years of building our brick breaker dream with a great team of 5. Still... something felt not quite right. Something was still missing. But now we found it! We were missing a Frank! We are proud to let you know that we found one. Not just an ordinary Frank, but Frank Meijer! Frank has a history of game journalism and he will focus on spreading the word on Caromble!. He will not only focus on game press, journalists and social media, but he will also try and talk to you as much as possible, our players. He is going to help Caromble! to reach many new players and to find out how we can keep our current players satisfied. Please welcome Frank in the comments below. He will appreciate it :)
With Frank in our team, the rest will have more time to focus on coding, level design and the art of Caromble! and that will probably improve both the quality and the development time. Furthermore, with Frank we have an extra pair eyes to look at Caromble!. His eyes are not burdened with 7 years of Caromble!, which will probably give us fresh insights. So having Frank in the team is a very good thing for Caromble! on multiple levels.
Steam Awards
Now this news has sinked in, we would like to ask you a favor. As you might know, Steam has introduced the Steam Awards. Every steam user can nominate Caromble! in one of the pre-defined categories, or in a custom one. We would like to ask you (if you think Caromble! is worth it) to nominate Caromble! in the custom category: "I Thought This Genre Was Dead". You can type this in if you select the bottom checkbox. We think that Caromble! earns this award, because it shows that a brick breaker can be very exciting and much more than a breakout clone. We hope it shows that brick breakers aren't dead at all and that there is so much more to discover in its game mechanics. We appreciate your votes!
By the way, this is one of the level of Chapter 4 we are working on. Introducing the switches:
Thanks for reading and let's get ready to Caromble!.
Caromble! Friday #373 - Prototyping the Commercial Level Art
We’re now starting doing the commercial chapter of Caromble! We have test-levels so far, that show the puzzle ideas we’ll use. But they need a lot of tweaking. Not just for the gameplay, but also for the art.
The art assets for that new area are just dummies right now too, so they don’t look up to par. It’s a common practice to do called Prototyping. That way ideas can be tested without spending big production time which then might be scrapped if the ideas don’t work out.
This is the earliers blockout stage – just using literally a block shape and some texture from another mesh. Not a beauty – but quick to do.
After the basic usage was tested in the game, I made a better mesh – and created an UV texture mapping (with a checkered UV test texture).
Then I used an earlier concept to drop in a very basic texture blockout. This will represent the final result much better – but a real texture with normal map and other effects still has be created.
There is work left to do on this asset – but once our team tests this in the new levels, I can much better tell if the idea works. All those steps help previewing the result without committing too much work too early. And there are still quite some assets to go over – to keep track I place them on colored blocks.
The Commercial-Area assets on color-coded floors for easier working. Blue for the ones that are still in the early blockout stage. Red is for the ones that still need the final texture pass. And green is for completely finished assets.
(Brick-)Breaking News: Chapter 3 has been released!
We are proud to announce the release of Chapter 3! You’ll find a lot of added content and a new Arkatron (Caromble!’s special power-ups): The Cannon!
We’ve also added a prologue level:
And a time-trial skill level ‘Race’:
The time it took us to come to this major update was longer than we hoped. We really didn't sit still in all this time and have added, improved and fixed a lot. In retrospect we have fixed too much for a single update. In the future we will consider doing more updates and not only when we have finished a full chapter of content. Let us know what you think of this.
A selection of everything new in this update can be found in the release notes below.
We’re eager to hear your feedback so we can make Caromble! the brick-breaker you’ve always dreamed of!
Release notes
What’s inside this update?
Major features
4 Story levels - New level content! A total of 12 subareas + boss fight.
Prologue level - Introducing the epic fight between paddle and boss. (Note: This level is placed before Chapter 1).
Skill level - Race! A tough and fun time-challenge.
New* Arkatron - Our new special power-up is a cannon mounted on the paddle! Shooting with it results in fancy, weird explosions!
Mercy ball - When you are game over, you'll get a chance to forfeit your current score and time (bye bye medals) in return for an extra ball.
Improvements and minor features
Paddle physics. It now has a better collision shape.
Paddle destroys objects on touch.
Spin effect tweaks.
HowTo for the Arkatrons.
Score particles more present.
Game/rendering engine optimizations.
UI improvements.
Steam cloud saves to share the same progress on different machines.
Gamepad/controller menu navigation fixes.
Lighting enhancements in levels.
More animated textures, e.g. hit particles, fire.
Better balanced difficulty of previous chapters.
Bug fixes
A lot! Power-up weirdness, UI glitches, gameplay deadlocks, crashes, etc.
Thank you!
Thank you for all your feedback, patience and support! Let's get ready to Caromble! some more!
Crimson Owl Studios
Caromble! Friday #372 - Start up issues
Another Friday, and this time there is a Friday post again! It has been a bit quiet around the Caromble! offices* lately, with me (Thomas D) being on Holiday. With Peter and Raymond being absent and Thomas S spending his time in a separate art dimension, that left just Pascal to do all the hard work. But as you can gather from the existence of this text, I am back from my holiday in Taiwan. It was an awesome time, and Taiwan is such a nice place to visit. But I'm also really happy to be able to work on Caromble! again.
Just like I'm having a bit of a slow start (on account of doing nothing useful for a month :-) ) so was the game having a bit of trouble starting up on the machine of one of our users. Caromble! ships with a custom java run-time environment. This is kept locally, so as a player you are not troubled by java pop-ups and what not. Caromble! quietly finds it own Java, and works with that. At least, that is what is supposed to happen. For one user the run-time environment wouldn't start. No matter what we tried, but we couldn't get one of our development PCs to reproduce the issue. Luckily after a lot of mailing back and forth, and a lot of patience from our prospective player (Thanks!!) we finally managed to find a work-around. We made a batch script that did exactly what the .exe did, but for some reason that did work. It is not a perfect workaround, because the game still won't start from Steam directly. But at least the user could play the game.
We will continue to look into the issue, and hopefully will be able to release a .exe which runs fine on all PCs. If you suffer from the same issue please contact us, per mail on info@caromble.com, or on our Steam forums.
*HAHA, actually it is more like a Caromble! kitchen table.
Caromble! Friday #371 - Parenting
The last weeks have been extra busy because not one but two Caromble! developers became dads! So next to fathering a video game we also start to raise some little humans.
Proof:
(Our little friends had some problems communicating their preferences concerning privacy so we gave them some Caromble! Censor Bars™.)
Peter and his significant other created two persons at once!
Raymond began his family expansion with one baby. Notice his bad posture that is similar to how he works on Caromble! :P Hopefully his contribution to evolution will be better than:
Happy gaming!
Crimson Owl Studios
Caromble! Friday #370 - Tributes to Arkanoid and help from you?
Today was my (Pascal here) first of 4 Caromble! Fridays where I will be working all alone ːsteamsadː. Thomas D. is traveling through Taiwan with his girlfriend. Peter and Raymond have other reasons why they are not here, but I think it's better if they tell you themselves why this is the case. @Peter and @Raymond: the announcement for next week is for you guys!
Ramp issue fixed This week I finally found the cause of the issue where balls got stuck inside the ramps, which we mentioned previous week. It's a bit technical, but here it goes anyhow:
By removing the plane floor under the ramp, we couldn't reproduce the issue anymore which pointed us in the right direction. Turns out that our engine did something not quite right when handling collisions with multiple objects over which the ball should roll. Our code sets the speed of the ball directly in this code (overruling the physics engine). Now if the ball collides with 2 of these objects, only the second object has an influence on the ball as it overwrites the speed set by the first object. In case of colliding with both the floor and the ramp, it could be that the floor collision was handled as last, overwriting the effect of the ramp.
We now fixed this problem in the current build!
Reaching an audience I think that this was the last bit of programming I will be doing for quite some time as we need to focus on marketing now. We are programmers (+1 artist) and we are not so much trained in the art of marketing and reaching an audience. However, it is very important to reach an audience as that will result in revenue, which in turn allows us to spend more time in making Caromble! better and perhaps even making a new game after this. Furthermore, we get happy feelings inside if people play Caromble! and enjoy it, You can make a great game, but if no one has heard of it, what's the point?
So we are focusing on reaching an audience for the coming weeks. It seems that it's a bit harder to get noticed as an Early Access game. Written press seems especially less interested in that. So we are mostly focusing on youtubers. We hope that this will result in many Let's Play videos or Twitch streams to reach players that might be interested in Caromble!.
Do you have any tips for us to reach players that would like Caromble!? Do you know curators, youtubers, blogs or individual players that are especially interested in brick breakers or Early Access games? Let us or let them know. We can use all the help we can get! ːsteamhappyː
Arkanoid tribute What was nice today is that PixelProspector has mentioned us in a list of 3 games that are tributes to Arkanoid. We are mentioned together with Wizorb and Shatter, which are nice titles to be standing next to. You could help us by retweeting this tweet.
Caromble! Friday #369 - Ramping up (or in?)
I spend most of this Friday trying to figure out how it is possible that sometimes our ramps trap the ball. Which looks like this:
After a first unsuccessful attempt of reproducing the error we did get an idea for a nice new powerup. We might add something that will allow you to shoot a volley of balls later, or maybe we can make a skill level around it.
After another hour of toying around I did notice that sometimes the ball seems to be slightly inside the ramp. I think that is probably related to the issue. Especially because when the error occurs the ball reports that is hitting both the floor beneath the ramp and the ramp itself.
But at the end of the day no luck. I still don't know what exactly is triggering the bug, and why it only happens from time to time. So I guess the bug gets to live another day...
