The Crystal Towers 2 Orchestra

[davidn]

Even though I don't watch it as obsessively as I used to I've kept checking the online scorecards for the Crystal Towers 2 demo since its release, and I see several people managing to complete it and obtaining the one instrument that's available in the demo. The identity of this instrument is randomly generated from a list of names (most of which I copied over from an earlier identical idea in Treasure Tower) - so far we have such examples as:

The Drums of Worth
The Trumpet of Calderia
The Bass of Naugus
The Drums of Omega
The Keyboard of Eve
The Guitar of Calderia
The Bass of Lachesis
The Flute of Mars
The Guitar of Jeff
The Bass of Clotho
The Trumpet of the Ancients
The Drums of Cleves
The Keyboard of Mayonnaise

That last one was a bit of a surprise to me because I didn't remember putting that name in the game - but as all these possibilities are stored as a plain text list file, it's possible that someone was just opening files curiously and editing them around a bit.

Also, people just seem to keep on getting better at it. I suspect some further cheating is going on.

Comments

[ravenworks.livejournal.com]

Ahh, plain-text forms... I should check and see if the iPhone "Mole" game is still populated with 999,999,999 scores from "lolcat", that talented master of videogame-playing.

[davidn]

For the actual submission, I use an MD5 hash along with the data submitted by the game... not impossible to break, but I think it's more likely that someone messed with the local save file (which, unlike the name list, is actually encrypted).

[ravenworks.livejournal.com]

So why don't you think they would have just messed with the name list?

[davidn]

Oh, the name list has definitely been edited - that's easy enough to do, and the game will just pick a name out of it and then happily include it in the save file without any need for hacking around. How someone managed to get 104.76% of the game completed, as shown in the last link, is the greater mystery to me.

[ravenworks.livejournal.com]

Ahhh. ;)

Well now I'm curious! At one point, one of the games I made at work was getting impossible scores on the high score list -- I went to ridiculous lengths to protect against hacking (not a simple thing to do in Flash), only to eventually be told that there was a safe spot in the corner of the screen, oops.

[davidn]

Ah... the most obvious method is often the most difficult to think of guarding against :)

Likewise, it's possible that I just left a couple of keys lying around in places where they could be accessed by jumping off-screen or something, therefore allowing more items than it's assumed possible to get - but I'd be surprised that they hadn't come up until now.

104.76%

[(Anonymous)]

hehe, that would be me :P. I found a glitch where if you use the double jump spell in the air, you can make another double jump. I used this glitch to find a couple of extra keys.

Re: 104.76%

[(Anonymous)]

I actually still havn't got two of the medals. I asked how to get them in the forum, but no answer.

Re: 104.76%

[skelux.livejournal.com]

Nevermind, i read a previous entry and found out i need 100 gems in the level.

Re: 104.76%

[davidn]

Ah, hello :) Well, thanks for letting me know! The extra health potion on SortacoreB was done in much the same way, I think, with the double jump-cast again-double jump method - this is something that was only recently pointed out to me, and it had gone unnoticed since I started writing the game. I'm not sure whether I should just leave it in as an ability, now!

Yes, medals are for 100 gems - I'd actually given up on the forum because all that ever happened was that I had to clean spam out of it, but it's nice to know that someone used it ;) To answer your question there, the versions are all the same but will come up as different icons on the player list - something I did at the last minute to see where the game was being downloaded from the most :)

Re: 104.76%

[skelux.livejournal.com]

I think you should leave the move in and add some areas you can access with it, but be carful not to leave things lying around like in the demo. I don't think i'll ever be able to stop playing until i find that health potion sortacore has :P.

Anyway, 106.35%.