This won't be enormous news to people who already own the game, but Crystal Towers 2 now has a demo on Steam as well, the equivalent of the old free version. In it, you can play up until the second boss - a fair amount of the game!

Saves made using the demo will carry over to the full version.

http://gtm.you1.cn/storesteam/app/396190/

Hi again - I made a tiny change to the game today to properly support joysticks that only have one D-pad, another thing that slipped past my testing. If this now fails to pick up your other joysticks, please shout as loud as possible!

I was also interviewed by Clickteam for their Indie Game Creators site[indiegames.clickteam.com], about making games in Fusion - and I don't know how they got hold of that profile picture they used for me :)

Last night I joined the ranks of developers who release a game and then issue a patch the day after - shame on me! But when you're just one person writing a game with a couple of testers, some things are bound to slip through. I removed a small bug that could turn you into a zero-health zombie in Ironworks B, which produced interesting but undesirable results.

I've also added an option to run the game at 60 frames per second instead of the default 50 - a couple of people I talked to were having speed issues with the game and I wondered if their graphics cards weren't agreeing with a locked 50fps, so added this to help them out. I'd meant this option to be hidden in the right-click menu but it turns out the game offers it up to you whenever you launch it from the Steam Play button.

So you can now play the game at a slightly faster pace if you like - bear in mind that everything's really tuned for 50fps and the clock on timed missions will run a little fast in this mode, but you might find it more comfortable.

The new edition of Crystal Towers 2 is now available! Thanks again to everyone who supported this game through bundles and in Greenlight - I hope you enjoy the new version.

If you bought the game through Indiegala, you should be receiving a Steam key from them shortly.

Several months after being Greenlit, the new XL edition of the game is nearly ready!

I spent the past weekend feverishly playing through the game and tracking down any remaining little issues (it's apparently about 12 hours long now, and that's if you know what you're doing). I found one major one, where the game counted the number of items you'd made using the new Synthesizer menu wrongly - so I'm incredibly glad I caught that before release.

The trading cards and game rewards like badges and emoticons are now uploaded and waiting for approval - when I get the word on those, hopefully in a couple of days, it should be time for release!