Crystal Towers 2 - Looking Back

Right. Now that I have caught up with some of the testers, I can finally talk about what the actual game's like. Unbelievable as it might sound, I hadn't actually played this game all the way through ever before - my role in its creation was in laying out and perhaps testing the levels, then typing a load of different objectives, items and recipes into a spreadsheet and then sending it out to see how people got on exploring the world. I've made a couple more changes as I went through - I have absolutely no idea how they got past some of these missions without the option (as I have) of choosing to tone them down a bit in the interests of sanity, but overall it seems to have come together pretty well.

Look at how atrocious this old logo is!

On the last post, tamakun got me thinking about the early stages of the game, and looking at how far it had come since my first prototypes were posted - it's quite incredible looking back over the records that I kept in this journal tag (and earlier on its own journal, crystaltowers2 before I realized this was a horribly awkward way of doing things) and seeing the differences. It's the first game that I've made that's large enough to have had a decent amount of content cut from it, as ideas that were there from the start of the game turned out that they didn't work, or were replaced with polished up versions later on (the continual cycle of doing this being to blame in quite a large part for the game having taken four years to reach this point).

The prototypes are still available, buried back somewhere in the early entries of the separate journal, and the whole thing looks like a completely different game. I've now reached a point where I'm fascinated by looking at things that even I'd forgotten about, and imagining what might have been - I found a heap of old icons that I've been wondering how people would react to if they saw them after playing the game without knowledge of what they were intended for. I'm also struck by the way that this was (for the most part) before I had the idea of categorizing them, and so a couple of them have colours that I really don't remember putting on them.


The whole game is based on exploration and collecting, and what I really hope will happen is that people will eventually share their techniques in how they got past certain sections or how they discovered certain artefacts in the rather larger-than-intended world. If you've ever encountered, for example, the... er, enthusiasm of the Sonic community, with them pulling apart the games and betas and discovering all the hidden things and quirks about them... if anyone ever writes something that insane and obsessive about one of my games, I'll be very happy indeed.