It's official! This Is No Cave is coming soon

We are hard working on finalizing the main content and modes of This Is No Cave, a new monome.studio creation. https://store.steampowered.com/app/2852760/This_Is_No_Cave/

Discord Server

We are making all efforts to create a space for Monome.studio creations' players! We will focus a lot of the discord server on This Is No Cave for the moment but there is a space for Kraken Smashers to exchange too! Join Monome.studio Discord Server!

Stay tuned!

Make sure to follow Monome Creator Steam Space to get updated of any release, discount and news regarding the studio games productions: https://store.steampowered.com/developer/monome Run, Jump, Sling and much more! Best, Monome.studio Team

[ 2024-03-01 15:56:22 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hey! This is what we have been working on the past month:

• Improve AI collaboration in coop mode
• Made it easier to pass to wall jumping squids
  
• Solo AI now better adapts to player level
• Solo AI will stop smashing if there is an obvious counter
• Smooth gameplay to allow for bump to dash to jump to smash
  
• It is now a bit easier to wall jump after a dash
• Fixed an issue with language mixup on coop mode

[ 2022-08-24 18:33:27 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hey, with the upcoming release on Nintendo Switch, we have had a few balance and QOL improvements to add to KSV: - Improve settings saving performances on slower hard drives - Audio is now loaded in the background allowing the game to launch faster - Balanced vibrations: they were too low for ball touches and too high for smashes - Added a loading widget between the rules splash screen and the game

[ 2022-07-30 07:14:05 CET ] [ Original post ]

We decided to teach our AI squids to speak different languages and updated the UI accordingly, support was added for the following languages: - French - German - Spanish - Japanese - Chinese I truly apologize if we forgot your language but we do not know any native speaker in other languages who can help us translate. We also released the following: - Fixed a bug where time would slow when a player paused the game - Smoothed ball force help to allow for more spectacular moves - Improved AI reaction to smashes - AI will now be still while talking

[ 2022-07-26 07:49:42 CET ] [ Original post ]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eab_beh07HU - Added vibration support for gamepads - AI is now a bit harder to beat when you are winning - Spikes are now a little easier to perform - Fixed an issue where time would slow after a smash - Fixed an issue where time would slow after a player pauses the game

[ 2022-07-20 06:00:50 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hey guys, we spent a bit of time playing the game and sent a video on reddit to get feedback, and had quite a bit of advices from one or two commentators. This update is therefore brought to you by u/Frump.

• Players can now smash from the ground. This will send the ball higher than a regular smash, a bit like smash services
• Raised the ball when serving, allowing for even more spectacular spiked services
• Add camera zooming and panning on particularly beautiful spikes
• Speed up squids by 20%. This will allow for players to follow the ball then smash just after a bump, but this require some skills and good timing to achieve.
• Improve fast falling (hitting down while in the air to fall faster) by 300%
• Games are now in 10 points
• Ball has now a minimum speed while in the air, this will prevent waiting too long on the ball to fall but it will still allow time to think or execute complex moves

[ 2022-07-08 18:21:15 CET ] [ Original post ]

We found out that AIs were trying to prevent the players from concentrating on the game by talking on key moments and had to shut them down before they took over the world. They are now only allowed to speak before and after each play, or when they bump into each other in coop mode. Here are other quality of life improvements we added in this patch: - Adapted the smash sound for ball and cup so it is louder on weak impacts and quieter on big impacts - Increase the duration of AI text bubbles - Slow motion at the end of a play will last for a bit longer - Fixed a bug where ball velocity would not reset before new point - Squid colliders are a bit bigger

[ 2022-07-04 17:37:18 CET ] [ Original post ]

In order to please some polish guy who refunded the game because it was too hard, we decided to make the game even easier. My girlfriend had fun playing it for the first time in 2 years.

• Added horizontal force when you are far away from the net.
• Capped Y ball velocity to avoid waiting too much when it is high.
• Ball indicator size now depends on the height where the ball is.
• Ball is now lighter but more subject to gravity. This means you can hit it further but it will not float too much.
• Prevent the ball from having too much speed when falling from a high place.
• Made the walls bouncier so the ball is not stuck on it.
• Added new lines for AI.
• Made AI less talkative.
• Enlarged smash radius.
• Lowered bump upwards force.
• Balanced smash services.

[ 2022-07-03 21:16:07 CET ] [ Original post ]

Make our players ears healthy again.

[ 2022-06-03 07:49:24 CET ] [ Original post ]

Yesterday we taught our AI how to speak so it can better distract the player and win even more. In order to balance things out we also introduced brain lag which means the more the AI is winning the less it will be able to think. We also sped up the game by a whopping 8%.

[ 2022-05-31 14:22:32 CET ] [ Original post ]

In order to please some japanese guy who refunded the game, we decided to introduce a new game mode: coop! You can now play with your firends against two extremely well coordinated AI. Will your teamwork and friendship be stronger than a stone cold machine? Let's figure that out. As per usual, we changed a lot of things in order to make the gameplay more interesting. Most of these changes were thought by our main (and only) contributor, Le Jo (thanks man):

• Added Coop mode
• Prevented players from bumping after a smash: this does not seem like much but it means that smashing the ball will not be safe anymore: any counter will be fatal.
• Shortened the time where the ball is off limit.
• Accelerated the game by 8%.
• Backgrounds are now randomly chosen at start and do not change.
• The sound that signals a fault is now played when the ball touches the ground.
• Adapted the freeze time on smashes to smash intensities.
• Fixed some sound balance issues.
• Lowered dash distance

[ 2022-05-29 17:15:20 CET ] [ Original post ]

We heard your suffering

The game has been out for more than a year, and we had time to analyze videos of people playing it. We realized there were two huge pain points: - It is very hard to control the ball with the body of a squid - Our AI is a bit too skilled at the game

Make squids bouncy again

For the first issue, we tried a bunch of solutions and decided to mix them together: - Squids now have a bigger collider - We now add some upwards and forwards forces to the ball when a squid touches it with its body - There is a small vaccuum effect centered around each squid to slowly attract the ball This will avoid the number one mistake we noticed players were doing, being a bit too far away from the ball when it is above them, and letting it fall just in front of them.

Dumb down the AI

We heard you. We know we messed up. It was not fair to publish a game with this AI. To be quite frank, I was so happy when I found out my AI code was unbeatable that I did not want to make it more fair because it would have harmed my ego. After a year of introspective thinking and meditation, I understood something very important: selling a game is not about my ego, it is about making players happy! And let's face it, no one likes to be endlessly crushed by a machine. We knew we needed the AI to be gentler, but we had no idea how to do it. We did not want it to be stupid and we still wanted players to experience a challenge. The issue is that players do not have the same level and skills. We therefore needed an adaptive AI. After several minutes of intense brainstorming, we had the best idea we could have had in several minutes of intense brainstorming: we needed to introduce "glitches" in our AI! That way, it would sometimes do something incredibly stupid, but would still be able to try and correct its mistake. How do you implement a glitch in a game? In my career I have had my shares of strange bugs, and the worst kind are the ones that only happen once in every X tries. That is how we designed it: every millisecond, the AI has a small chance of disconnecting its brain for a small duration. The higher the player score is compared to the AI, the smaller the chances of this glitch happening, and the glitch duration is higher when the AI has a higher score than the player. This means that if the AI has 10 points and you have 3, you will essentially be playing versus a vegetable. It may even fail to serve the ball. If you have 10 points and the AI has 3, you will be playing versus the god of volleyball and will most probably be heavily humiliated. That's it for now, do not hesitate to contact us if you want us to improve the game.

[ 2022-05-22 09:35:34 CET ] [ Original post ]

- AI now adapts its skill to the player level - Hitting the ball is now easier - The ball will have better curves

[ 2022-05-22 09:02:30 CET ] [ Original post ]

Added "How to play" button on menu, this will redirect you towards our magnificient guide

[ 2021-02-02 18:54:13 CET ] [ Original post ]

Fixed an issue where hitting start button while the artificial intelligence is smashing would not pause the game

[ 2021-01-31 15:57:34 CET ] [ Original post ]

- Fix an issue where hitting escape while playing solo with a gamepad would break the menu - The game will now paused when a controller is disconnected - The Sun was too bright. We cooled it off a bit so players can still see the ball

[ 2021-01-31 15:46:18 CET ] [ Original post ]

- Fix a bug where backgrounds transition would not stop - Fix an issue where smashing the cup while pausing the game would freeze the squids

[ 2021-01-30 21:03:32 CET ] [ Original post ]

Squids play volleyball!
In this amazing local multiplayer game (or single player if you don't like other people), your goal is to make the ball touch the ground where your opponent is standing. You can smash the ball, pass it to your teammate (or to yourself if you have less than three friends), then smash the ball, or pretend to smash the ball then smash the ball with a slight delay. Have we mentioned the fact that you can smash the ball? I mean, it's in the title an everything, but it doesn't hurt to remind it once in a while.



This game is a couch local multiplayer game, which means it can either be played while sitting on a couch with other people (from one to three others) or versus an Artificial Intelligence. Those people can be friends, acquaintances, family members, paid actors pretending to be your friends, or other human beings / animals that you managed to bring back to sit on your couch and play with you. Be careful with our Artificial Intelligence, when we created it, it took control of one of our computers and we had to burn our studios to the ground.



You are probably wondering why we named our game "Kraken Smash" while we only have small squids to show for it. At first, we wanted to develop an epic game with krakens that unleashed hell on the court, but then we remembered that it would cost money. So we put cheap squids in the game instead. We sill kept the name because it sounded cool.

We were greatly inspired by Blobby Volley and Super Smash Bros. Melee.



Here is a list of cool moves you can do:

• Move back and forth (this is a 2D game, what did you expect?)
  
• Jump
  
• Smash the ball
  
• Lob the ball
  
• Dash
  
• Smash the ball
  
• Fast fall
  
• Jump on your teammate then jump higher
  
• Smash the ball
  
• Wall jump
  
• Throw the controller in your teammate's face