What else?

So you might’ve been waiting for me to reveal another enemy in Caveman Craig 2.

However, we’re gonna keep it secret. To find out the final enemy caveman, you’ll just have to buy the game when we release it (and of course, progress far enough in the game to meet him).

As Rhys mentioned, we’re planning to release the game sometime mid-this-year. We really value your patience, and that’s why we’d like to keep you keen with images like the one on the left here.

Rhys has developed a system where Craig earns experience points by showing initiative, killing dinosaurs and kicking butt. The experience points can be spent on all sorts of handy items such as this tower thing. The dude in the top pegs rocks at enemies.

Development Stats

Out of curiosity, I ran a program to tell me how many total lines of code there are in Caveman Craig 2 at this point. It returned with 9,830. Unfortunately the program wouldn’t work on earlier versions of Caveman Craig 1, but here are some other statistics:

There are 189 sprites (images/animations) in the current build of CC2. The final release of Caveman Craig 1 Special Edition had about 180 sprites, but half of these were alpha masks. The latest version of Game Maker supports alpha masks within a sprite, so in a sense there were only about 90 sprites in CC: SE.

The current project file for CC 2 is 10.6mb. This is without music, frontend art (the largest images in terms of file size), most of the sounds, and a large portion of the sprites (not to mention code although that’s very small). CC: SE was 10.1mb when it was finished.

On my rather powerful machine, Caveman Craig Classic begins to slow down after around 40 cavemen (idle, following craig). Caveman Craig: SE was an improvement, slowing down after about 80. Caveman Craig 2, however, can handle 150!

Perhaps the most amusing, though, is this:
Caveman Craig 1 took 30 days to complete.
Caveman Craig: SE took 2-3 months.
Caveman Craig 2 has so far been in development for 3 years.

Oh the shame.
-Rhys

Caveman Craig’s latest foe!

Uh oh! It’s Prehistoric Pete!

One of the enemies Craig will have to face (without making direct eye-contact) is the caveman who predates clothes!

Prehistoric Pete is the original nudest and Craig will need to defeat him in Caveman Craig 2. Just… make sure that leaf stays on.. please…

 

Also, seeing as Rhys did it, I’ve uploaded a picture of my workspace… as though anybody cares!

I can’t remember the exact specs of my computer – nothing too amazing – but the software I use is:
Toon Boom Digital Pro – Fantastic animation software which I use for animating the characters in Caveman Craig 2. It’s also good for general drawing. There have since been more versions of the software (Animate Pro and the secret Harmony), but digital pro is the best and most well-behaved of them. I also use Adobe Photoshop CS2. I use a teensy tiny Wacom Bamboo drawing tablet (it’s the cheapest one, and it works nicely).

I also use a Rode NT-2A microphone for recording voices and stuff (my wife is a singer, so she uses it for that too) and a very minimal recording set-up.

Also in the photo you can see about 15% of my Simpsons/toy collection. I have a heap of Simpsons, Toy Story and general cartoon merchandise including some original animation production cels from Rugrats, Aladdin, The Simpsons and Rocko’s Modern Life. All inspiration for Caveman Craig??.. sorta. I just like toys.

 

We are making good progress on the game, and we may even be able to confirm a release date soon! Stay tuned!