In contrast to the various imaginary milestones that I set to make myself feel better about the whole thing, I can now say this: Crystal Towers 2 is now complete.

Physically. (Yes, I know.)

That is, all the content that's going to be in the game is now in the game - all levels and bosses exist, the entire hub level has been laid out, and the tree of new abilities and rewards that you can get with them has been implemented. Like every single other thing in this project, I found that that the number of abilities and synthesis items had been rather overambitious and cut both back a little to make the task of playing the game (never mind writing it) feasible - I now know why I've been slightly disappointed with the branching factor of many hub-based games in the past, and it's because if you put it up any higher at all then it's just impossible to deal with.

Given how I usually operate, it's a small mercy that I'm only changing one thing that's absolutely fundamental to the game's interface at this stage. From the very beginning, it was intended to have two spell slots (the internal name for the magic button has been SP1 since the game was started), but early on I decided that it wasn't really necessary. Well, now that there are more than twenty of the things and you're going to be using some much less often than others, the second slot is absolutely necessary once again - once you get more than about five of them it's too unwieldy to use the left/right flips, and using one of those buttons for a second spell just made more sense, so I eliminated one control and turned the other into a second spell button. Using the magic now feels much more satisfying and slows down the game much less - it works on the levels I've changed the behaviour in so far, and now all it needs is a heap of copy and pasting to propagate it throughout the game.

As to why I use the caveat "physically" above, it's because there are patches that are technically completable but need some dressing up before they're actually presentable, still needing some of their graphics drawn or to make the mechanics a little smoother. I'll also need an introduction and end sequence, but if the game's finished first then I can just do those for as long as I can stand them and no more.