The Daily Click

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Author:	David Newton (DavidN)	Submitted:	16th January, 2010	Favourites:	3
Genre:	Platformer	Downloads:	311
Rated:

Edited By David Newton (DavidN) on 1/16/2010

It only took me three years to get here - thanks to Kisguri for finally pushing me into getting something releasable together

This is a small demo of the project I've been working on for a distressingly long time, Crystal Towers 2. After people found out about his adventure in the first game, Bernard has been dismissed as nightwatchman but has been sent to the nearby Music Castle to recover the disappearing music crystals.

In this demo you can explore the lower levels of the Music Castle, collect orbs, gems and keys, and gather abilities to eventually defeat the boss through the gold teleport. You can upload your progress to an online scorecard, and share your achievements in the game with other players of the demo.

Thanks to everyone who playtested and provided graphics!

Crystal Towers 2 site with cheap-as-free domain name: http://www.crystaltowers2.co.nr

Review This Download

http://www.clickteam.info/davidn/ct2/zip/democrystal2.zip (7.51 mkb )

Posted by UrbanMonk

16th January, 2010

Rated :

Yippy!

Posted by AndyUK

16th January, 2010

Heh, it really was a bit of a coincidence that I invited you into that Messenger conversation to tell you to hurry up and finish Crystal Towers 2.

Posted by AndyUK

16th January, 2010

OK now ive played it i'll comment.

It looks to me like you've taken the first game and added more of everything to it. Which is great. It would be nice if there was a bit more variety though. The challenges are a nice touch though.

The music is brilliant and pretty much like the first game, I dunno if it's your style or if they're remixes but they're great all the same.

A few things I didn't like however,

once again a platform game has spikes that look like you will get hurt only on the top but actually get hurt by walking into the side!

It was actually pretty easy, the only time i died was when i fell down a hole at the bottom of a level, I wish it was more obvious where the pit of deaths were!

and when changing to fullscreen in the options it kept returning to windowed whenever i pressed X even when changing another option in the menu.

So overall looks to be a top game, but a little samey unless the demo just doesn't show it all off.

Posted by columbo borgi :C

16th January, 2010

YEAH DLING

Posted by Hempuli

16th January, 2010

Rated :

Great to see you achieving your goals! As I've said before, I enjoy this game a lot. The fifth star isn't there because of the certain lack of polish in some of the graphics and because the game gets sometimes a bit tedious when you try to beat the same level over and over again, with very small differences.

Posted by -Liam-

17th January, 2010

Screenshots make me go *_*

Posted by Kyle Strait

17th January, 2010

wow man wow i remember looking at this on youtube last year and it was my inspiration to start makin games! Thank you so much for making a demo!

Posted by Kyle Strait

17th January, 2010

i think maybe you made Walnut Creek A a lil to hard for being that early in the game either that or im just not used to the way that your camera has deceleration lol but outstanding job!

Posted by Jess Bowers

17th January, 2010

Very cool. I really like the online tracking of your progress.

Posted by UrbanMonk

17th January, 2010

Rated :

php ftw

Posted by nim

17th January, 2010

Nice work David. I'll play it properly soon, I only had an hour with it today but first impressions are good. If you're looking for criticism: the camera switches direction very quickly and is a little disorienting for me and the text (all-capital pixel font) is a little hard to read for my poor old eyes. I didn't try fullscreen mode but perhaps that would help. Good luck with the rest of the game

Posted by KNPMASTER

18th January, 2010

wow terrific. online tracking of progress and player stats is great work. The game kept me interested for quite some time, and after I turned it off had the yearning to go back and play it again. I liked the idea of different missions for each stage.

Posted by Tharky

18th January, 2010

Rated :

At last. I thought you were not going to publish the game

Posted by Rick (AntiMatter Entertainment)

19th January, 2010

I found a bug. After changing the window type to full screen, if you then go to an option further down the list and use the left/right arrow keys to change it, it switches the fullscreen off. It also turns off if you select the OK on the menu, and I'm guessing if you use the activate key on any option. To keep full screen, I had to select it and then press the Z key to go 'back'.

[EDIT] I see AndyUK's already reported the bug, but I'll leave what I said here because I go into a little bit more detail.

I agree with Nim's comment about the camera panning, and Kyle's observation about Walnut Creek's difficulty. For a starting area, I died way too many times. This may be because I like to collect every single thing in these types of games rather than go straight to the exit, though. Perhaps if I focused on the getting to the end of the level I wouldn't put myself in so many hazardous situations, and this may be an intentional design choice so it's up to you whether or not you think it is valid criticism.

Anyway, you have a remarkably solid collect-'em-up going on here. The online features are a beautiful touch, everything's presented rather professionally, and I like the idea of the magic, hopefully the different types that you have planned will add interesting new mechanics to the game instead of just different coloured attacks being able to destroy different obstacles. I like the little flairs you've added here and there, from the enemy combos to the way your character flips when he's bouncing off of something, it all just makes the game feel more complete. I must say, though, that apart from collecting everything, there's not a whole lot going on just yet. It is only a demo though... and I guess that's kind of the whole point of a collect-'em-up.

Anyway, I must commend you on a job well done. It's obvious you've spent quite a lot of time on the presentation of this game and I can see you've also taken the time to make the engine solid and responsive. I'll definitely get the full version when it's done.

Comment edited by Rick (AntiMatter Entertainment) on 1/19/2010

Posted by TechVision

19th January, 2010

I really like this demo, and the stats system is very clever indeed. Keep up the excellent work!

Posted by JFrudy

22nd January, 2010

Looking good Newton. I haven't heard about this in a long time. I thought you might have given up! I was getting ready to go to sleep and I suddenly felt like I should check to see if you posted any info on this yet. Keep it up, and let me know if you need anything.

Posted by nim

23rd January, 2010

Shame he's still too much in the huff with TDC to say thanks for downloading or respond to these comments. What happened back then while I wasn't following this community?

Posted by David Newton (DavidN)

23rd January, 2010

Now... this is an awkward position, isn't it? All I was doing was giving it a week for comments to build up before I responded (I did the same on the thread I made on Clickteam) but if I post now it looks like it's a response to that. Nevertheless.

Thanks for all the comments so far! I appreciate the constructive criticism, too, which I'll take on board for the full game (especially those spikes, just for you

) I've been playing with the scrolling since the game's start and am still not entirely sure if it's right yet. I'm also surprised that there are some comments saying it's very easy and some saying it's very hard - not sure what I can do to balance the difficulty level in that case!

A couple of other people have reported strangeness with the fullscreen option as well, going back when you move away from it - I can't get it to happen myself, but the whole loading and saving of options needs a revisit anyway so perhaps it'll be ironed out then.

I was also rather undecided as to how acceptable it was to get players to re-enter levels so early on - I'm going to try to make the challenges interesting and different from the start to prevent it feeling like you're just doing the same levels over again (like the special situation in Luminous Tower, you'll know the one if you've seen it). The full game's going to have more levels, obviously, too, so there'll be more of a choice of where you want to visit next.

Finally:

Thanks for downloading. Here is a response to these comments!

Posted by UrbanMonk

24th January, 2010

Rated :

Why would he be in a huff about us?

I like the game. Better than I could do anyways.

Posted by Jon Lambert

25th January, 2010

Walnut Creek is awesome. It didn't seem difficult to me. But why is it that I cannot boost through a ring to go to a level?

Posted by David Newton (DavidN)

25th January, 2010

Oh, I think you might have uncovered a bug there! To make sure that you actually go through the rings and don't just touch them, the game checks for you having been at a few different X co-ordinates while touching one of the teleports - I bet the Boost spell launches you through it too fast for it to register. I'll have to put together a less tacky fix for that for the full game

Posted by KreatorKat

20th June, 2010