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

[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.