Caromble! News

Dear Caromblers!,

It's been a while. We hope you are well. We all are. A new (human) baby was born in the Caromble! family. This is the 6th baby since we conceived Caromble!. Wow... how far we've grown.


(this is not a picture of said offspring)

Today we'd like to inform you that we are finally gameplay complete! We wrapped up the gameplay of the final boss fight and the interactive epilogue. What's left to do is tweaking the lighting and some environmental art in those areas. Furthermore, we are still working on the narrative intro and outro.



We can't imagine we won't leave Early Access in 2021, so I dare to say, right here, right now:
Caromble! will go into full release in the second half of 2021!



We'll share more when we can, but know that we're still working on the first of the 7 Caromble! babies.



Thanks for reading. Cheers!

Hi Caromblers,

Here is a little sneak peek into the final boss fight. We have almost implemented all gameplay now. The aim of this fight is to challenge the player to use all the skills the game has teached you so far and in the same time providing something new, fresh and exciting. For us it is also a final practice in applying all game design lessons we have learned in this final area. It's been quite a ride making Caromble! and we have learned a lot, also by making mistakes of course. It's taken long, too long, but Caromble! is nearing completion!

We hope this small video (sorry for the low framerate, I have my casual devtop here now) makes you excited for the final chapter and the final battle!

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Stay safe!


Crimson Owl Studios

Hi Caromblers!,

We hope you're doing okay in these strange and confusing times.

All of us are healthy and we are all working our day-jobs from home (in the Netherlands). Due to the situation, some of us had to ramp up the amount of (regular) working days to full time. Furthermore, we're trying to restrict our screentime and increase our family time when we're not working on our paying jobs. This helps keeping us sane (at least as sane as we were).

You may understand this also has its effect on our Caromble! progress. We're keeping at is as we can. This screenshot is from the area that leads to the final boss fight. We added ourselves to the game if you don't mind. We even have a gameplay role there:



We're trying to be safe, healthy and sane and we hope you find ways to do the same. We are thankful for games to help us in this time (I'm currently playing Outer Wilds on PS4, love it!), but we are also thankful there is so much joy to be found outside of screentime. These times help us realize that more than ever.

We wish you all the best!

The Caromble! team

Dear Caromble! friends,

Our Caromble! project started as a technical prototype, mainly tot test the capabilities of our self-build game-engine. This was over 10 years ago. We started out as die-hard techies, but as our inner designers emerged and as we grew confidence in our level design skills, we dared to use the potential of Caromble! to investigate the gameplay possibilities of a brick breaker (breakout/arkanoid) game beyond what was done before.

We believe that with Caromble! we found ways to add new layers of gameplay, elements of other genres, into a brick breaker game which hasn't been done before.
Because of this it is still exciting for us after all these years to be making this game.
Because of this it is exciting to play.

We hope you'll be surprised in every new chapter with the new types of gameplay we introduce. There are still many ideas to explore, but we're currently working on the final level of Caromble! and we can't do everything. Feature creep is a pitfall we stepped in over and over again. But looking back, it also helped us to make Caromble! into something unique. Something that's become more than a brick breaker. It's a... ehm... well, it's Caromble!.

In the final level there is one thing we still wanted to explore: is there gameplay without the paddle? Caromble! provides special powerups in the form of Arkatrons. Are these gameplay elements powerful enough to justify the absence of a paddle? We will now premiere some footage of chapter 6. The development of this level is currently in the gamepay phase, so lighting, graphics and polish are not yet there. Take a look at gameplay from our last level and let us know: Do you think there is interesting gameplay in Caromble! without a paddle?

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Thanks for reading and we believe 2020 will be the year!

Dear Caromble! friends,

As mostly in our announcements we'd like to say: sorry it's been a while for a progress update. We hope that by now you know Caromble! is always going forward!

At the moment we're working on 2 major things:

1. The last level of the story mode



The last level of the game is going to be the largest area we've ever made. We're really trying to come up with new combinations of gameplay mechanics and powerups that can provide new challenges and we're happy to say that there is still enough gameplay to explore. Chapter 6 introduces the last and final Arkatron powerup, namely jump, which gives the player more agency. Here is a sneak preview from our level editor:



2. The narrative/story of Caromble!:



The game will give some more insight in what is happening and why you are trying to beat the red angry alien and retrieve the Arkatrons. It will be told in a comic-book style. We're currently working on coloring the separate panels and after that we're animating separate images in the panels. Finally we will place all panels in a 3D-environment and create awesome camera curves to bring the story to the screen. We hope you'll like it!