Hello, fellow time traveler!
The new year is nigh, so it's time for me to pop my head up, blink a few times, then ask, "... what... year... is it?" and try to figure out what's happened since 2023.
A lot, it turns out!
Crashlands 2
[img alt="Crashlands 2 in build mode, showing Flux in the center wielding her Space Wrench, all of the tiles highlighted in aqua blue, and a bunch of cartoony furniture and decor. The cursor hovers over a chest."]https://i.imgur.com/S9F0ZFd.jpg
The biggest thing for 2024 was, of course, Crashlands 2 becoming nearly complete. Back when we announced the game in 2023 we thought we'd have it done by the end of this year. We were optimistic on that front, but not for lack of trying! To give you an idea of just how hard we've been working over the past year:
- 🎨 We added 700 new art assets to the game, consisting of 2200 parts (animated elements, animation frames, variants, etc). We had to add a whole new artist to the team to make this happen!
- 📚 We added 80,000 words to the game's text (quests, item descriptions, etc), bringing the total to 130,000. That's like... two novels? 100,000 words have been translated so far, thanks to the work of dozens of translators and editors.
- 🧸 We added 3,100 new assets (items, resources, characters, quest nodes, etc).
- 🌐 We updated the World Map 2,300 times and the asset database 2,200 times.
- 🧑💻 We added 18,000 lines of code.
- 📦 We built and tested 333 versions of the game. Since we have separate builds for each platform (Windows, iOS, and Android), that's a total of 999 builds!
That's a lot! Especially with our tiny content team (2 artists, 1 game programmer, 1 writer). And even more so given that our team also added 👶two more entire humans👶 to the mix! (Welcome to the world, Ruby and Jack!)
But hey, we're still on track for a Q1 2025 release and we'll be making the official release date announcement Soon™!
Crashlands (Original)
Some cool things happened for the original Crashlands in 2024, too:
- We sold more copies this year than in the past several years combined, thanks to excitement around Crashlands 2 and to some very aggressive discounting.
- Floydson did a complete playthrough of Crashlands. It's amazing to see the entire game compressed down to 2.5 hours and the commentary is hilarious.
Levelhead
Levelhead's community is still making levels and doing cool stuff:
- Our first time in Games Done Quick! IllegallySam beat the campaign in 46 minutes, which is wild considering I still haven't even beat the game at all...
- Players published 13,000 new levels, 2,000 of which graduated into the Tower.
- Player FlowArt takes the lead for most-played levels: 250 days of playtime accumulated from 2.5 million plays!
- Player Cire takes the record for most published levels (884), and also has the most levels in the Tower this year (229). Player Sabre is just behind on total levels.
- Player Lommuck Fangiant leads in Ribbons with a staggering total of nearly 18,000! Enough to make me suspicious... In second place we have BeneficialExcellence with over 6,900.
- Player JuiceBox has the lead in Shoes (9,600+), followed by Cire in second place with 8,607.
What's Next?
Next up is getting Crashlands 2's release date announced, and then getting the dang thing finally done. We're tired, but still so excited because we absolutely cannot wait to get it into your hands. We've poured our hearts, souls, time, blood, sweat, tears, and everything else we have into this game, and we'll be sharing it with you soon!
FIN
With that, it's time to close out this edition of the Bscotch Ballyhoo. Until next time, go wishlist Crashlands 2 on Steam, if you haven't already!
Oh, and our 500th podcast episode (!) comes out on January 1st, 2025! Did we plan that? Nope! Wait, I meant YES DEFINITELY we're super good at planning...
💖 Your Spacetime Anomaly,
Adam Coster
Webslinger @ Bufferedvideo Stillloadingans
P.S. Bscotch is now on Bluesky since that site's really popping off. Sam and myself are on there, too. We'll post little previews, videos, behind-the-scenes commentary, blah blah blah over there now and then, so check us out!