I had the privilege of playing Count Crunch’s Candy Curse a new game by Black Hive Media.
From the very start, this game is unique. You are immediately immersed in the story line as Black Hive uses a movie style to quickly get you up to speed. As you start to play, it is obvious the objective. I felt right at home sitting on my couch trying to get to the last level.
The art and sound really add a great feel to the game. It feels like a Halloween game. It sounds like a Halloween game. A few times I found my self humming the music in my head. After playing, I wanted to go watch It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown
I still have not beat the game yet, but I am close. Another evening of playing and I think I will complete it.
It is just hard enough to make you put it down a few times, but then you won’t be able to resist picking it back up again!
Thank you @slackmoehrle for all your hard work at cocos2d-x and for taking the time to play!
I have promo codes for iOS and Windows store for any one who’d like to check it out! Please rate/review it and follow us on Facebook and Twitter if you like the game!
Reply with a code it you take one, please.
iOS:
J94TME3XNFRX
MHNHKJA4633F
PF67EYPKE7T4
WFRK6Y334HE9
TAJHY67744Y3
WAAT9NKWKN7X
@mandylowry no, thank you for using our engine, as well as being creative with it. It makes our team here very happy to see a developer use our engine to facilitate the ideas they have. If this isn’t motivation, I don’t know what is.
Hi I’ve played for a couple of days now, here are my thoughts:
First, I really wish I could rate the game in the app store but that isn’t permitted for promo codes. Otherwise you’d have another 5 star review!
I really like the art both in the main game and in the other screens it is really well done. Why is it so big though? 420MB seems very large for a game of this type; that is about 6x larger than Big Action Mega Fight which is another Cocos2d-x game with nice art and lots of levels.
I like the skill progression system, it really makes the game more fun as you unlock those abilities. I have to admit I was a little bored before I could run and I didn’t realize at first I would gain these abilities. After unlocking a few though the game play becomes a lot more fun and varied - really more than I was expecting from a casual platformer.
I think it would be nice to mix up the enemy types a little more; having just one enemy type for each level in a single area seems kind of limited. You have to pass three levels before you hear different music or see a different kind of enemy - even though it is really easy and quick to do that I think some people won’t make it that far.
It is really refreshing to see a game that is simply paid for up front. I hope you can come back here and/or r/gamedev at some point and let us know how you did on the various markets, you’ve launched to more markets/platforms at once than any Indie I can think of.
Thank you for the compliments! While you cannot rate it on Apple App store, you are more than welcome to rate it on the Amazon Store.
The art was all done in-house by my husband, Blake, using Photoshop, Spine, and then I packed everything using TexturePacker. Which is one half of the reason why the app is so large. On our post-mortem that we will write in the coming weeks, I will address some of the file size issues. So I’ll keep you all post on the link for that…maybe I’ll post it here on the forums!
We’re glad to hear the abilities brought some depth to the game, and how it was not clear at the beginning of the game. Thank you for bringing this to our attention, we will see how we can make this more visible upfront and message it better.
Having more variation in each world would be nice, and with such a short dev cycle we were limited. We are doing a small update before Halloween, so we will see how we can incorporate this feedback in there as well.
Multi-platform was our goal from the start of all this, so we were constantly testing across all of the OS’s during development. We are so glad we did it though, even though it’s so time consuming. But with using cocos2d-x it makes it so damn easy! However the biggest caveat is submitting to each store which has proven to be a big task.
We hope to hear more feedback from the community, and please don’t hesitate to ask questions! Again, we do plan to write a post-mortem in hopes of helping and inspiring more devs, especially the ones here in this community.
This is really useful… I’ll try to squeeze that into the update! Unfortunately, if you use a promo code to redeem an app, you aren’t allowed to rate it on the Apple App store.
Hi, Can i ask you some question about your game technique?
I see you design your level pretty good, did you hand-crafted game level or using in-house editor or 3rd tool?
As i know, cocos2d-x didn’t support camera for 2d node, if i want to move character around a level i need to move a whole layer, did you use other technique
Your game look promising, especially the game visual, hope it will become a success!
Hi @nbtthief! Great questions! We used Gleed2d to design the levels and used the written parser class which made it really easy to integrate. For the player, he is a physics object so he moves through the level by applying velocity, which varies depending on walk or run. The Camera does follow him in an update function:
Camera *camera;
camera = Camera::createOrthographic(kVisibleSizeW, kVisibleSizeH,-10, 10); //3.75
camera->setCameraFlag(CameraFlag::USER1); // player layer.
camera->setPosition(Vec2::ZERO);
this->addChild(camera);
int x = MAX(_spineBoy->pos2.x, 0);
y = MAX(_spineBoy->pos2.y, kVisibleSizeH/2.25);
Point actualPosition = Vec2(x, y);
centerOfView = Vec2(kVisibleSizeW/2, kVisibleSizeH/2.25);
Point viewPoint = ccpSub(centerOfView, actualPosition);
Vec2 targetPos = Vec2(-viewPoint.x, -viewPoint.y);
camera->setPosition( camera->getPosition().lerp(targetPos, 0.1) );
Moving the entire level just wouldn’t be very efficient, so I chose to do it this way. Hopefully this gives you some idea of the way it works in game.
