Crystal Towers 2 - It's over

[davidn]

I've finished Crystal Towers 2. Shut it, I have. No excuses or technicalities this time - I've created a folder for a copy that I'm calling a release (unless there are any objections from testers or major flaws discovered), I'll give it a last test whenever I can be bothered, put together a demo, and it'll be up on Fastspring by the end of June. Four years and two months after I wrote the very first post about plans for it.

I didn't mean to spend the entire long weekend on it (come to think of it, I didn't mean to spend my entire marriage on it), but it just didn't quite let me go until this afternoon. I'd been experiencing something of a block at the last crucial moment when one piece of music remained to be written and nothing was sounding right at all - but then I found a Megadrive soundfont that absolutely revitalized me and caused me to come out with this for it. Now I just need to resist the temptation to go back and re-stylize the entire rest of the soundtrack the same way.

I would put it here if Livejournal would allow me to embed the bastard. Click here instead.

Good night.

Comments

[ravenworks.livejournal.com]

Ah, FASTspring! I was wondering what good putting the game on Formspring would do you. ;)

Man, I hardly know what to say - congratulations. Not a lot of folks can say they've put this kind of time and effort into a project, let alone seen something so big through! I'm dying to finally give it a proper go now that everything's in place... I don't want to sound rambly or premature, but man, three cheers on behalf of all the folks who get to enjoy the fruits of your labours :)

[davidn]

It's a real indication of the problem when you can't remember the name of the service you signed up for in preparation to distribute a game - I had to search back through my email with terms like "registration" and the game's name to find out where my account was. And that's another thing that's new to me, and I'll have to learn once I've got a final ZIP...

And thank you :) I'm hoping that it'll get some attention!

[rakarr.livejournal.com]

"The advantage of this setup is that I can start low and build up, so that when I eventually get fed up of it it can be easily rounded off and completed without cutting the game short."

That was the idea, anyway...

Really, congratulations. It's been "almost there" for so long that it actually being finished is sort of hard to imagine, but monumental and excellent nonetheless.

Once it's released, I can make people play it and laugh knowingly when they're stuck on the hard bits!

[davidn]

The theory was sound, the execution wasn't - the idea was to create the start and the end of the game quickly, and then fill in the blanks. I did have a 'completable' copy as early as 2008, true to my word, but I didn't do nearly enough to the start and end at that stage. And I'm rather glad for it now, because things have changed so much in the last there years that I would have had to redo them all anyway.

[kibet.livejournal.com]

Well done, so when is Crystal towers 3 being released :p

[davidn]

I would hope several years after I'm dead.

[kjorteo]

Suddenly taking two years for my novel seems almost speedy.

But what can I say? Congratulations. This is... certainly an achievement.

[davidn]

Has this been going on as long as we've known each other? I think it might have. It's been so long since I've released anything that I'm beginning to wonder how I ever managed to get the courage up to declare anything finished - that's now my one obstacle to releasing it.

[kjorteo]

Yes... yes, it has. Believe me, though, I do at least know a small portion of that "oh my God, is this actually nearing completion?" feeling, even if my years-long project turned out to only be half as many years long as yours. When I was first outlining the entire novel, I had some fairly neat scenes in mind that I wanted to do for the climax of chapter 8 (and thus, the entire novel) but of course I was just faintly dreaming of the far distant future at that point--with a whopping seven large-story-sized chapters to write first, the thought of actually getting to the point where I'd be writing those scenes seemed completely unfathomable to me. I mean, it'd take years.

Well, it did take years. Still, that time has now passed, and here we are. I'm actually working on those very scenes right now. Just... what, how.

Anyway, I suppose if you're that phobic of actual releases, you could always take the Google approach and put out something you claim is a WIP, let it sit there more or less unmodified (beyond patching obvious bugs people find) for a few years, and then one day randomly ninja in a stealth patch that quietly removes the word "Beta" from the title screen. :)

[davidn]

It really is wonderful to finally get to the stuff that you had in mind many years ago, as this... reward for making it through the rest of the work to get to this point. For me, I suppose that was the touching-up phase that I did after the end of 2010, where I could concentrate on the storytelling scenes and not worry any more about how there were these gaping holes in the game.

I hope to see the last chapter at about the same time that this thing gets released :)

[kjorteo]

Much to the exact opposite of how I felt while struggling with chapter 7, I'm actually blazing through this one much, much quicker than I had expected. I might have the first rough draft done as early as a month and a half from the release of the last one, exactly half the time it took between last one and the one before. The actual dream I had that would eventually give me the idea for this whole thing occurred on July 9, 2009, and at the current rate, I will very, very easily beat the milestone of at least finishing up the creation phase of the whole thing (in that the rough of chapter 8 will be done) well before the two-year anniversary.

Don't start watching your e-mail for the release just yet, though, as what will undoubtedly happen is that much, much time will be spent with another round of previous chapter fix-ups. The problem with writing a novel for two years is that you have two more years of practice and experience with it by the last word than you did at the first. Were this a serially-released episodic webcomic or something, I'd just let the obvious Art Evolution take its course, but... since this is supposed to be one singular novel, the older bits are now in very desperate need of a fix-up, if not complete overhaul. I'll probably try to get all that done at the same time I'm proofreading the chapter 8 rough and then [re]release the whole thing at once... someday.

Then I, too, will finally know the peace of not having a years-long project looming over my head when I try to do anything. I'll just jump immediately back into another project, I'm sure, but... it will finally be a different one, at least.

[davidn]

This is the exact Forth Rail Bridge problem that I described for the game! Once you've spent that long on it, the older bits are looking slightly tatty, so you go back to do those again, and once you've done that, you have some new ideas for how to do another part better, and eventually you've gone through the entire thing and you're back to looking at improving the first part yet again with what you've learned now. I got most of that over with in my years of delaying, but I'm still putting in little aesthetic touches (the gem display in the hub now spins around you as you approach a teleport ring) and I need to just stop myself.

But I wish you luck with that process, and you know how much I'm looking forward to seeing the whole thing completed as well :)

[kjorteo]

The good news is that it only takes me three months a chapter to write the novel, not to revise it.

Hopefully.

[lupineangel.livejournal.com]

Awesome, man! Congratulations on finishing such a huge undertaking! I'm looking forward to playing it once it's out (and once I manage to get it to run under WINE :P)!

Now just sit back and let yourself rest before starting CT3 - you've earned it! :P

D.F.

[davidn]

The potential to do some other projects without the guilt of a big one nagging at me will be a very welcome experience :) I have a couple of ideas for short-term ones in the near future, but then there's a platform adventure that I've wanted to do for a while...

[kjorteo]

You did mention that your history of created games has suspiciously nowhere near enough furries....

[davidn]

Which is absolutely true! Somehow I've never used them - perhaps a lack of ability to draw anything decently discouraged me before (though the version of you I did on the spur of the moment worked out pretty well). So I want to venture into that, and also do something that allows me to write more...

[kjorteo]

I think you've gotten over that problem by now, to be sure--other than getting my foot the wrong color because you forgot the spikey boot patterning, I think the me-specific edits you made in making that spur of the moment thing for me are actually better than the surrounding areas of the base sprite, now--at the very least, the fur and such are shaded while the clothing very noticeably isn't. You definitely have it in you to make something suitably pretty now, I think!

And linking to my icon there reminded me that apparently I'm sometimes better with pixels than I thought I was, too... so I guess I could maybe offer a bit of help here and there, or something. :)

[tamakun.livejournal.com]

Platform-adventure? Why don't you just say you're already thinking about CT3 ;)

Joking aside, congratulations on making it to the finished product! I'll be looking forward to seeing this pop up on all the gaming-news sites once it's released :)

[davidn]

What I have in mind for this is something more like Tombi (or, less massively, Dizzy) - something more based on a continuous world than individual levels. Perhaps some of the environments of CT2 can feature, though, because over the last livening-up phase I've really felt myself growing attached to the world as I write more of it together.

And - we can hope :)