Making good bosses is hard - the idea behind them has got to be varied and fun while still presenting a challenge, and there's a lot of programming for a small section of the game. Ideally, I think they should seem overwhelming at first but then become easy as you watch their movements, learn the openings and start to fight back effectively.

For people who allow their progress to be updated to the Crystal Towers 2 site, I keep track of how many times bosses have won agains the player and how many players have defeated them. "Score" is [times won]/[times lost] - I think that 2 is a pretty reasonable score to expect, as it implies that players lost to the boss twice before beating them on the third attempt, a decent balance between presenting a difficult enemy and keeping the game going.

It looks like Beam Stack is still the hardest boss, although not by as ludicrous a margin as before - in the first version of the game its score was up at 12 or so. All it took was a little change - making its laser turrets to flash before firing made it much fairer and I think it's one of my favourites. The next hardest one is Xenon Squad, which is fought in a different way from everybody else - its high score might be because players are spending lives working out what they're meant to be doing, though I tried to hint better at this in the new edition.

At the other end of the scale, The Cleaner is exactly where it's supposed to be - it's an introductory boss and even though I actually ramped up its difficulty this time around, it's sitting comfortably near 0.5 (you'll probably win against it first time, but if you don't, you'll get it next time). The absolute lowest is Lava Tank, which is easily my least favourite of the bunch - I think it was the first non-platform-style boss I made for the game and it just wasn't challenging enough despite my attempts to make it more acceptable for the new edition.

There are a couple of surprises as well - Megacarrot, despite being the last boss of the game, is sitting slightly below The Cleaner in terms of difficulty, although it could be because only the really dedicated and powered-up players get to him. I made an effort to drastically rework Sci-Fly compared to the first edition because it was too easy as well - it's only got to a measly 0.83, but I think this is actually much higher than before.

And Cubombscus is at a very respectable 1.81 now despite being one of the easiest before. In the first edition it had a bug that meant that it always remained on its easiest setting no matter how far you got its health bar down, a mistake corrected the second time around!

Crystal Towers 2 has a Steam page and everything now! All the checks by Valve are out the way and I have the freedom to declare it ready whenever I like - it won't be long until it's set live and purchasable.

Here's the trailer on Youtube, at a better resolution than the Steam one.

In the process of making the new edition, I've come across and fixed several amazing bugs that apparently went unnoticed the first time around, including:

- In the introduction, I forgot to turn off the keys that let you look up and down - so you could cause earthquakes by holding either arrow key and getting the scrolling to start moving then rapidly twitch back to where it was supposed to be.
- In the non-Desura releases of the game, the Cubombscus boss had a very obvious red and yellow detector object left on-screen which should have been made invisible. People seemed to just assume it was meant to be a flag, which says something about my drawing skills.
- Magma Lizard was unfortunate as well, as the background on the surface of his level was a terrible-looking mountain-shaped placeholder that I forgot to replace before releasing the game.
- Midway through the game you get an upgrade to your navigation in the Music Castle, with little text labels showing the nearest levels to you. These didn't appear if you had just come out of a level towards the right of the hub, because the objects were located at (0,0) for a split-second before being moved, which was deemed too far away and they were automatically deleted.
- The "mosquito" type creatures throughout the game are drawn as dragonflies. This is I forgot the sodding difference between dragonflies and mosquitoes.
- The Lava Tank boss was terrible. This isn't really a bug. It just was.

I've finished my first pass through the updated game! The new version is completable from start to finish now and it's really been helped by the screen size change. So far I've talked about the graphical updates for Crystal Towers 2, but there were also some things about the gameplay that needed addressing. So let's talk about how the magic system now works!



As you can see from this profoundly ugly work-in-progress screenshot from early 2007, when I first planned the game you had one magic slot available. The idea was that you would go through the game gradually collecting spells, which would allow you to deal damage to enemies or act as keys to access new areas - a spell to destroy walls or pull magic switches remotely, or let you jump further and so on. You could flip between spells with the left and right shoulder buttons.

The trouble with this approach, as ever, was that I didn't plan very well. As soon as you collected more than about five spells, it was already too awkward to tap your way forwards and backwards through the list. So I replaced that quickly with a grid of spells in the pause menu that you could select from, which helped with the speed of selecting magic but there was still too much going into the menu for swapping around. Eventually, even though the game was quite far into development, I conceded that the game seriously needed to allow you to have two spells equipped at a time.



This alleviated the problem of having to switch around so much - the player could now have an attack spell and one with another use equipped at once without having to go in and swap between them. This instantly made a lot of things more comfortable - it made bosses in particular so much more enjoyable because they're the places where you most need to use offensive magic and you would otherwise be toggling back and forth forever. But I was really patching over a symptom with the wrong solution - in practice, the player would usually want to use that second spell slot for something like Double Jump which had to be recast all the time.

One of the friends I got to test the game suggested that the player could also be allowed to set up shortcuts to frequently used spells on the number keys, to allow them to switch to spells they frequently used without going into the menu. I added that as well, which made things slightly smoother for the moments when you wanted to use an ability then quickly switch back to the motion spells, but I'm not sure how many players used this feature or were even aware of it (you press the number keys in the pause menu while over spells to bind that key to select the spell quickly).

The real problem - and what I had overlooked in the beginning - was that the player was going to want to use many of the spells throughout the entire game rather than to get past specific obstacles. Being able to double jump or dash to the sides is a useful ability no matter where you are, they aren't something you just want to switch to occasionally to get to a high place. So in the XL version, you're going to find these new blue books in place of a few of the red ones:



And you'll also notice a new type of spell in the rearranged grid - along with the red attack magic, yellow player-affecting magic and green environment-affecting magic, there's a section of blue slots at the right that shows your abilities. You'll get instructions for how to use them when you hover the cursor over them - but they're now always on without having to select them.



Double-jumping now just costs 1MP per use - not enough to worry you when bouncing around a level, but it might be enough to sap magic for other uses if you overuse it. Boost is used by holding down the formerly underutilized Use key and pressing Left or Right, and you can now use teleporters with a tap of the Use key as well without having to pick out the spell. The fourth converted spell is Draw, which I think was largely ignored before because it was so awkward to go in and select when it would have been useful - but now you can hold down Use while standing still and vaccuum lingering synth items towards yourself for future crafting.



So, next on the agenda is sprucing up some of the bosses a bit, and getting some to work with the new screen size (there are no game-breaking errors, just that some of them need adjusted to work with more room now). After that I want to get rid of the rest of the Windows fonts that you can see around these screenshots, add some Steam-exclusive stuff like achievements, and hopefully have the game out relatively soon!

There was another big issue that a lot of Crystal Towers 2 players raised - either directly asking me about it or just when talking about the game on forums and so on - and that was the absolutely godawful camera. As difficult as it might be to believe for those who were made nauseous by its intense swinging around, I spent a lot of time adjusting it for the original release. Even when working in just two dimensions, getting the camera right for a game is deceptively difficult - the simplest approach, just nailing the player to the centre of the screen feels unnatural, like you're moving the game around your player instead of the other way around, and you have to make the camera feel like it's natural while not hindering the player's sight of what's around them. There are a number of great articles around that go over this, such as this one.



The idea in the original game was to make the camera always give the player a view of where they were heading, speeding up when you turned around so that you could instantly see a large part of the level ahead of you again. The thing that I failed to notice was that you don't actually need this feature - progress in a platform game is usually in one direction, and the vast majority of times you'll turn around are for briefly going back to collect a pickup or dispatch an enemy, so you don't want a sudden swing of the camera to break your stride. Of course, there are also the two vertical levels to worry about, where you'll often change direction - Luminous Tower and Azure Cliffs - so the camera still needs to be aware of where the player is heading.



This time around, the camera still has its directional awareness but it adjusts much more slowly - it checks to see where the player is looking, and moves a little over up to a certain distance away from the player's position in the window to give them more of a view ahead, rather than suddenly trying to catch up to a point ahead of the player. The experience, I hope, is a much more comfortable one that doesn't lose the advantages of what I was trying to do in the first release.

Vertical scrolling is a different beast entirely - taking cues from games like Commander Keen 4 and Bio Menace, the camera generally stays where it is (within limits) so that when you jump up from a platform you don't suddenly scroll up and lose sight of it. It's only once you land on another platform that the game readjusts to the new height. Perhaps I'll make adjustments to this as well - but through all of this, having more screen size like I described in the last post is a vast help in itself.

If you haven't seen what happened yesterday already...


What a fantastic late Christmas present! The last real push the game got was during its involvement in the IndieGala bundle which was a couple of months ago, so I'm not sure what spurred it over the finish line... but I'm amazed that it did, and very grateful for everyone's support and words of encouragement! It looks like I'll be spending the rest of my break polishing the game up and improving the bits I really dislike but didn't have the strength to go back and fix the first time...

Good morning! I recommend you take a look at the IndieGala bundle this week, for reasons that will be very obvious.


Thanks once again to DF, lupineangel, for the image that became the cover artwork - it really sells it!

An old project might be coming back again (and doesn't it feel strange describing it like that) - I've submitted Crystal Towers 2 to Greenlight on Steam!


If you've got an account, I'd really appreciate a vote up and a few words, followed by optionally spamming it to all your friends everywhere. The more votes I get on this thing, the better a chance I have of it eventually seeing a release there. I would also welcome any copy-editing of the description I currently have there, because I am terrible at advertising my own games, possessing as I do the natural enthusiasm of a bag of pencil-shavings.

Even besides that, plans are also in place to have it featured as part of an independent bundle - so it may get a revitalization either way.

(Incidentally, lupineangel... yes, am I legally okay just considering your picture the official cover artwork for the game, by now?)

Oh, why am I working on Crystal Towers 2 again. I thought that once I had finished it I would just release it, wait for the reaction and never open it again, like my previous games - but with something this large, it's difficult to just drop it from my life, especially with the facility to watch people's progress in it online.


I haven't been reworking the main game or anything, though - today, I ended up writing a new feature for the site that awards people badges on their account, largely due to kjorteo warning me not to start thinking about what he said too much because it would end with me writing a new feature for the site that awards people badges on their account. The badges are equivalent to achievements, a concept that I had thought up at the very start of writing the game and that I now find myself copying from everybody else instead - though I'm trying my best to try to keep them to actually notable things instead of the supremely patronizing levels to which they can be overdone.

The awarding of all of these badges is just calculated from data that's already there, but they give people a bit of recognition for doing special things like not dying too much, or getting past some accidentally notorious missions that I put in. The shield with a "B" icon is awarded for every level in which you've completed the whole thing - all items, treasure and everything - and haven't died once, and I've actually been quite impressed by its presence at all when browsing around the existing accounts.

I've actually used a few testers' user icons in some of the achievements, for when the random instrument name generator comes up with "the Wolf", "the Rabbit", "the Coyote" or "the Raven" - if you're any of these, you'll know who you are, so if you don't want to be featured for any reason, tell me and I'll remove those. And lupineangel, I used your artwork for the final bonus boss icon without asking - thank you!

No doubt I'll add more as I think of them...

I wrote a bit of a scary page last night. Among the many statistics/obsession-generating things that I put into the game as part of the submission to the online scorecards, a game timer was notably absent. It wouldn't have meant a whole lot to me during my own testing anyway because I was going over the same stuff so much, but I found myself wanting to know roughly how long this game actually was for people who were new to it.

So I put together a page to estimate the amount of time someone had spent playing. It only works on people who have had the automatic updates to the scorecard on from the start, so I'm not going to link to it from the main site at all - it works by looking at all the events associated with a player that indicate having done something in the game, and accumulating the time between them as long as the gaps are of less than half an hour (the assumption being that if someone's taken that long to do anything in the game, they've gone off to do something else for a while. That or it's the Dust Hill C ghost.)

Of the people who have completed the game with absolutely everything found, the usual figure seems to be around 30-35 hours, which is a fairly substantial length - theoretically the time to just see the end sequence should be about half that, if I estimate that the point you do that is at 60% and take into account that the earlier portions should be easier and therefore take less time than the later ones. It's about time somebody other than me spent a significant amount of their life on this game - particularly as even after release, it still hasn't quite let me go.

I think it's safe to say that I can forget any hopes of actually having this game ever out of my life. I've set up Google alerts and analytics and I still can't stop searching for myself. And that's when I'm not looking at the scorecards and seeing how fast people are making progress. Here, for the purposes of cataloguing and boasting, is a list of significant articles I've seen so far:

http://indiegames.com/2011/06/crystal_towers_2_released.html - Indiegames (pleasantly surprised)

http://www.extraguy.com/2011/06/crystal-towers-2-is-out-today/ - Sort of a repost of the Indiegames one

http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/06/19/this-weeks-best-free-pc-games-5/ - PC Gamer's list of free games (mentions enjoying the storyline and dialogue. Not bad being on this list despite not being free, is it?)

http://www.giantbomb.com/crystal-towers-2/61-35736/ - Wiki entry on GiantBomb

http://www.giantbomb.com/profile/ahoodedfigure/impulse-buys-and-a-crystal-towers-2-profile/30-83312/ - Blog on GiantBomb (the word "love" is used)

http://mediocritycodex.blogspot.com/2011/06/indie-cred-david-k-newtons-crystal.html (Flowery but enthusiastic - and you can comment to get a chance to win a free copy)

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/06/15/celestica-crystal-towers-2/ - Rock Paper Shotgun (Appreciative yet patronizing)

Out of everything I've seen written about it, however, this is pretty much my dream. To have someone who discovered the game on their own be sufficiently enthralled by it to fill in the map that I gave out to a couple of people, to write a guide to finding each level, the objectives and the use of the spells (notably finding some of the less obvious uses of them, as shown in his comments) and soon, how to get each item in the game. Given the accidental size of the challenge it's helpful to anybody to take notes, but it's a wonderful feeling that anybody cares about the game enough to produce or use such a guide.

I'm also relieved that people seem to be able to work out what to do on the final boss. I'd worried that I'd be faced with a heap of people entering the level called 'Silent Void', seeing nothing there and just standing around stuck.