Crystal Towers 2 seems to put me in one of two opposite moods at any time - there are times when I see that it's really coming together and going fantastically, and there are other moments when it seems like I'm running a marathon with my feet on backwards and the whole thing is an insurmountable task. Hoping to reduce that last feeling a little, I poured all efforts into putting some sort of cap on the game last week, and the game is now completable from start to finish.

Some more work may be required here

That's very different from being complete, though - all it means is that I've set up some levels in the hub room that go to placeholder bosses and levels. (The model I used for the levels, disconnecting the actual frames entirely from their objectives or level names, accidentally helped out a lot here, as you can just point a heap of things to the same in-game level and it'll track progress through each of them separately.) These placeholders allow you to start the game, wander around the very much under construction Music Castle, gather up items through the levels, collect the all-important Music Crystals from the bosses and deliver them to the roof.

This summary screen's quite nice, though

Once you have at least eight of the crystals you can fight the final boss (again, a blank but unique placeholder frame at the moment) and, from there, get to the end sequence and summary screen, which will allow you to upload your progress again and then dump you back at the main menu to try and get 100% completion (a handy device - thanks, modern gaming concepts).

I should admit that very little of this is actually new, but it's caused a huge shift to the process of making the game - mentally, at least. The process now isn't primarily one of trying to get something that can be called a full game (although this can't, yet), but instead an exercise in polishing things up and filling in the blanks. Once I've got the obvious gaps crossed, such as real cut-scenes, an actual collection of bosses, and so on, the focus will shift again to having a game that can be called "complete" at any time that I happen to get fed up of adding extras. Hopefully that'll happen later rather than sooner, but at least this way it won't get stuck in limbo like one-man projects tend to do when that one man can't stand it any more.

Taking a break is always healthy, though, so with this milestone passed I'm allowing myself to start a new experimental project or two. Neither of them will be gigantic, but one in particular is becoming far more interesting than I ever thought it would be.