Crystal Towers 2 - The Big Picture

This weekend I've been playing through Crystal Towers 2 - something that I haven't done in about a year. That may sound odd considering I'm writing it, but I hadn't realized until a couple of days ago that all my playing of it for ages now has just been little tests of individual levels and objectives, without stepping back and looking at the big picture of it to see how it's actually coming as a game so far.

The most striking thing was that ever since I accidentally started making an RPG instead of a platform game, I had no idea how big the whole thing had grown. When I thought up the basic game structure ages ago, with eight individual objectives per level (one of which was just completing it and the others were completing it in some special way, or doing something completely different) it seemed like a good way of adding legitimate content with the minimum of level-designing effort, but I hadn't considered that this would result in a sort of multiplicative growth that would put the number of individual "levels" currently at 128, with sixteen physical levels in various states of disorganization. Added to that are the rewards that can be collected on each level (four on each, and they can be a number of things - simple synth items or upgrades to your statistics or abilities), and the trophy items that you can get by collecting recipes and making them up using the Music Castle's central Synthesizer (get it?). And you're also awarded a little medal for completing a level with over one hundred of the little gems strewn about.

One of the sheets that the rules writer program looks at to generate the rules files for the game. It's much, much worse than it looks

So I don't think that longevity is something that I need to worry about (indeed, I'll have to cut back the time involved in getting some of the objectives if the number of levels grows much more) - the biggest difficulty I found when I played through the game was the balance of it, the times when you have the means to get new abilities from somewhere or other and their relative difficulty and obviousness. With so many different routes through it, this is something that's going to take some careful thought, and it'll probably be upset all over again each time I add any new levels. There needs to be a balance of feeding the player with new levels, and encouraging them to go back to the ones they have open already to explore them and put in some effort to gather items. With most of the game's numerical data (like the items required to enter each level) coming from an intimidating titan of a spreadsheet, those can be changed around as much as needed, which is just as well because it was completely off when I played it - the worst example was that you could get the first instrument of eight without a hope of actually being able to put it in place for hours.

Even though it's been ages since I worked on it and doesn't really have any features that wouldn't be achievable by using a couple of Post-It notes, BugRIT has been indispensable this weekend - having it up on one monitor and putting issues in as I found them made it much easier to keep track of what I needed to do, and it's nicely encouraging to see just how many little things I've fixed in a short time - though I have to make sure that I'm concentrating on fixing vital things instead of putting in anything new that's going to cause even more problems later on.

The best bug I've found so far is that you could only earn Medals if the game's music was turned off. This is the thing about computers - a lot of the time, completely separate things can work together to produce something that seems to have a mind of its own.