We're obviously way behind schedule - there were a lot of challenges and unfortunate circumstances that slowed development a lot, which I won't get into in detail now - but we never gave up! We've been working hard to get the game ready for release, and it's finally happening!
Petal Crash 2 will be available September 29th on Steam and itch.io!
I backed the game! How do I get access to my game code?
Early Access has a comparable amount of content to the first Petal Crash game. Major new features like Online play and the new Adventure mode, and extra content like the bonus characters aren't ready yet, but there's a whole lot already there to enjoy!
Arcade Mode: Face off in a series of versus matches against the entire cast! This is like a simplified version of the first game's Story Mode. Each fight is preceded by little snippets of dialogue - and now that the characters all know each other, you'll even see some unique interactions! For puzzle pros, you'll find that if you do well enough, there may be a secret extra challenge awaiting you...
Score Attack: All four Score Attack modes from the first game return! Score big with limited time in Time Trial, or limited turns in Turn Trial. Survive as long as you can against never-ending garbage waves in Trash Trial, and get the most you can out of a set of fresh boards in Chain Trial! Challenge yourself and rank up to Master status - and to those hoping to attain the rank of Grand Master, stay tuned to see what challenges we'll have in store for you!
Local Multiplayer: Play against a friend or the CPU in the 2 player Versus Mode! We've got way more customizable rules and modifiers than we did in the first game, including changing board size up to 9x9, up to 6 block colors, and brand new kinds of garbage. Go head-to-head in a classic Tug of War battle, or cook up your own wild new game modes!
Puzzle Mode: Petal Crash 2's got an all new expanded Puzzle Mode! Each puzzle now features a unique Goal you must complete to solve the puzzle, and can also include a Rule that causes you to fail if broken. Flag specific blocks to clear or avoid, fill up goal zones, aim for specific chain lengths, and more! The included Puzzle Map features 22 simple puzzles, with more to come in the future, while the full-featured Puzzle Editor lets you make your own puzzles and share them with your friends as "Puzzle Cards" - special image files with puzzle data encoded inside!
Profiles & Rewards: We've got more customization than ever! Now you can have your own profile, displaying your name in game and recoloring UI elements to match your chosen color. Extremely flexible Piece Customization lets you change the shape and color of every block individually to suit your accessibility needs or your own personal style. Express yourself with word-combination Titles and dozens of character Costume Colors, and earn more in the Treasure Garden mini-game!
How to Play: We've got a whole set of tutorials ready to view! Brush up on the basics, or let Lilibri guide you through the details of Petal Crash 2's mechanics! There's even a special What's New in 2 tutorial for returning Petal veterans that lets you know what's changed since the first game.
While we have grander ambitions for the future, we wanted to make sure Petal Crash 2 already felt like a full game when we released it. There's hours of puzzle fun to enjoy, and we hope you'll have fun chewing on it until we have more to show!
What about the backer rewards?
While this is a huge milestone for us, and the BackerKit campaign was meant to fund the game up to its Early Access release, we haven't fulfilled the promises of the campaign yet. Rest assured they haven't been forgotten! Now that the game's ready for Early Access, fulfilling the outstanding rewards will be a major priority.
Extra Characters: The campaign reached the stretch goal to bring the return of Libbie and The Baz from the first game, and two brand new Backer Characters are set to make their debut as well. These extra characters are going to be my focus for the game's first major content update. Libbie and Baz's theme songs are even already done!
Profile Rewards: The unique profile rewards, like Backer Badges and the Special Costume Colors (bronze / silver / gold, backer unique costumes, etc.), are going to be added once we start to implement Online functionality. This will likely predate full Online play, implemented alongside features like network-based puzzle sharing. Stay tuned!
Backer Sprites: While we have a basic credits sequence in the game, a more elaborate credits sequence with unique Petal Crash & Petal 2 style backer sprites will come in the future. This will likely be one of the last things to be implemented; there are dozens of these animated sprites to make, a process which will probably take me months, and I'm sure nobody wants me to delay new game features by months while I work on backer sprites! Once the time finally comes, I'll reach out via the method you laid out in your backer survey. Feel free to reach out if you have further questions, and thank you very much for your patience and generosity!
What's next for Petal Crash 2 after Early Access?
Our ambitions for major additions to Petal Crash 2 include Online Play, an enhanced version of the Original Story Mode, a brand new Adventure Mode with a new story, and Console Ports once all of the game content we had planned is ready. The BackerKit campaign was meant to get us to the Early Access stage, and the development of new features is largely going to depend on interest and resources from Petal 2's sales in Early Access. A maximally scope-cut version of Petal 2's final release would likely not include the original Story Mode, have only fairly basic Online functionality, and tell Petal 2's new story in a less elaborate way than the Adventure Mode we're planning.
That said, the version of the game WITH all of these features is the one we really want to make! We're going to do our very best to make it happen! Online play is especially important to us, since Petal Crash Online was a huge part of the first game's success. We know it can be hard to find arcade puzzle sickos to play with in your local area, after all! Of all the features we have planned, Online is going to be our highest priority.
Thank you so much? (This isn't a question)
Thank you so much!! I know we've lagged way behind where we hoped we'd be, but it's your support that's made Petal Crash 2 possible. I'm immensely proud of what we've created. It can be difficult to tell whether a game is fun or not once you've worked on it for a long time, but Jill and I recently played a bunch of 2 player matches to get footage for the new trailer, and we ended up playing for so much longer than we needed to because we were just having a blast.
Petal Crash is easily the best thing I've ever made, but ever since I finished the first game, I knew it could be better. I'm extremely grateful Jill and I got the chance to finally deliver on the vision of what a smoother, funner, more polished version of the game could be like; I am not a person prone to self-aggrandizing, but I am immensely proud of Petal Crash 2, and I genuinely believe that it's one of the best arcade puzzle games ever made. If there's a top 5, and two of them are Tetris and Puyo Puyo, I sincerely believe Petal Crash 2 belongs in that list alongside them. (The remaining two are your other two favorites and the order of the top 5 is yours to decide!)
It's only thanks to all of your support that my dream was able to come true. I'll never be able to fully express my gratitude; I can only hope that our work is able to give back even a fraction of what you've all given us. I want to spend my entire life brightening the world with fun games! Thank you so much for believing in me!
We're still working on getting Petal 2 ready for Early Access, and while it's taking a whole lot longer than I thought it would, I promise we're making progress! In the meantime, we've got a special surprise!
We had some visibility issues with last Next Fest, so Valve is letting us participate again! For real this time! We've got a new demo up that shows some of the progress we've made since last time. We've got some fun new animation, unique personalities for the CPU opponents, and more polished game mechanics!
This demo includes 5-minute Time Trial, local multiplayer, and even an early version of the vs. CPU opponent to try your hand against! It's only available until October 20th, so if you want to get a sneak preview, don't miss out!
The CPU opponent is our current focus during development right now; next update, we'll talk a bit more about it, and show off some of the new vs. challenges we're cooking up - until then, thanks for all your support!
Hello everyone! We're long overdue to give a status update on the state of the game, but we've recently hit the big milestone we've been working toward these past few weeks. It's taken a bit longer than anticipated, so we went longer without an update than I'd hoped we would, but that update is now!
Petal Crash 2 is actually already available to play for backers that pledged at the Backstage tier or higher! If you pledged at that level, check your BackerKit survey - you should now have access to a Steam key and an invite link to the backstage Discord server. You'll get access to the score attack and local versus modes, as well as the feature we just finished - the Puzzle Editor, with Puzzle Mode with it!
We've made some exciting additions, allowing for an even wider possibility space for your Petal Crash puzzles. In the original game, there was only one goal - to clear all blocks of a certain type. Now, that's merely one of several goals you can pick - you might be tasked with clearing a chain of a certain length, or arranging a specific shape on the board. We've also got a new "rule" mechanic - alternative failure conditions for puzzles that make them even trickier! You might have to clear your entire goal in one move, or even avoid clearing blocks of a specific color.
We've also got a brand new system for sharing your puzzles - instead of the original's long puzzle codes, now you have puzzle cards!
Each card is a .png file that contains the entire puzzle in its metadata - you can send these images back and forth with your friends, dropping them into your puzzle folder to play them. Personalized with your chosen player color, character, and costume palette, these puzzle cards are a great way to show off your creations. Collect them all! (Disclaimer: New ones will constantly be made. You will never be able to collect them all.)
The State of Development
It's no secret that development is going a lot slower than I'd like - I'd hoped we'd already have the game in Early Access by now, but we've still got a ways to go. In general, UI related work is taking much longer than I thought it would, and that sort of work makes up a majority of what's yet to be done.
That said, we've also hit a lot of exciting milestones, too. All of the character animation, music themes, and backgrounds needed for Early Access are ready to go. We've got a lot of fun stuff waiting in the wings to get hooked in, like our system for unlockable player titles and character palettes. The game itself plays great, and has been well received by both newcomers and veteran Petal sickos in our Backstage server.
All that we have left to do before the game is ready for Early Access is to have our How to Play demos in, get the unlockable customization system up and running, make a bunch of built-in puzzles for the Puzzle Mode, and get a vs. CPU opponent up and running for an arcade-style versus gauntlet mode. I'm hoping that we can have the game up publicly for sale in Early Access by the end of the year - we'll be doing our very best to make that happen!
Hello everyone! Time for another update - I'm sorry this one has been a long time coming!
Pictured: Lilibri doing her fun little pose!
Truth be told, I didn't want to make another update until we were ready to share a playable version of the game with our backstage pass backers, but things got a bit knocked off the rails. After my medical emergency a few months ago, I've had to take time for getting my physical and mental health in order, and just when I felt that was sorted enough, I found myself occupied with a big, expensive move - both the effort of moving itself and the extra work I had to take on to pay for it.
Even with me being indisposed, I thought we could still get a playable version of the game to backers out by the end of the year, but unfortunately that isn't looking like it'll be the case - almost everyone else is behind, too. Aside from the animation work I haven't been able to finish, we're still missing some music and backgrounds. Even if we proceeded without those, the coding work for the necessary menu and UI stuff has been stretching out many times longer than I thought it would and still isn't ready.
Once the holidays are over and I can finally give Petal Crash 2 my full attention, I hope I can do what I can to get development rolling smoothly! I'll be challenging myself to get all the character animation work done by the time everything else is ready for the backstage preview version - a couple of the characters are basically finished, which is an exciting milestone.
I've also got something else in the works - I had a lot of fun making Petal Crash enamel pins, and even during the Petal 2 crowdfunder, I was already thinking about doing another crowdfund just to get pins made of the entire cast. I'm trying to gauge interest, so if that's something you'd like, let me know!
Missing your favorite? They'll be back... in pin form!
I know that doing another crowdfund while the thing I've already crowdfunded for isn't done yet seems kind of suspect, but it'd help me a lot to make up for lost time if it's a success - plus, I did successfully deliver on the merch portion of the Petal 2 crowdfund already, so I hope that proves I'm ready to send out another batch of physical goodies just as promptly! I'm currently planning to hold it sometime early in 2025. If you get any money over the holidays as a gift, save it! To give to ME
That's all for now - hopefully next time, the game will be ready for a bunch of you to get your hands on it. Thank you so much for your patience and all of your support!
