Head on a Stick

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Well, Dan and I were going to go get some exercise, but Kelly let us know that the 300,000th person was about to post to the leaderboards, so we figured it would be better to knock out a quick update instead.

The title update is going well- we spent the weekend testing and testing and testing to see if the fixes work and it is looking pretty good. With any luck tomorrow we will be doing a big multiplayer test with everyone in Redmond. If everything goes well we’ll be moving from the “fixing it” stage to the “verifying” stage. After everything is fixed and verified by everyone and their mother, we’ll roll into the certification stage. If we pass that then we wait for the TU (title update) to be released. With all these moving parts, we are unable to tell you all with precision when the TU will be out, but we are working on it every day.

In the meantime, since I’m not a programmer, I get to do all the other stuff, like unloading the PAX delivery van and putting the trophies back on schedule (yes, AH HD trophy update tomorrow I PROMISE DAN!!!) Here’s a shot of some cool things we took to PAX but never made it out of my suitcase. I had cast 18 bronze helmet keychains before we left, (both Knight and Barbarian), and we’ve been trying to figure out what to do with them. They are very cool and very heavy. The far left is the head of the original figurine, the next is the wax casting, then the first bronze pour. The next one is the first polish and the final one on the right is the final polish.

We are going to keep an eye out for some of the coolest Castle Crasher videos on YouTube and on Friday we are going to give away the first of these keychains. I’m sure we’ll figure out rules and such tomorrow, so check back and in the meantime, post your videos…I mean, can anyone beat these?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fzmTqLToZk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhQM3Xwvt6A
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jy2fa8kp5tM

Best

john

PS, for those of you who were lucky enough to place an order on our webstore before we sold out, were waiting for our custom boxes to be fabricated before we ship them out. If everything goes as planned, we’ll be shipping this week. Check back later in the week for an update.

42 thoughts on “Head on a Stick”

  1. Sweet update coming out soon. Probably near the end of Sept or early Oct. I put this game on the back burner and I don’t play it because I’m waiting for this update so I can play online. Once the update is out I’ll actually play this game again.

  3. I wanted to buy the Blue Knight T-Shirt but it was sold out in XXL, and now it’s completely sold out.
    Are the T-Shirts getting a restock?

  4. Yes, we are getting more of everything in the store. With PAX, the title update and the figurines needing a long lead time to get them here we didn’t have enough people to keep the T shirts in stock…We should have everything in the store and new products by next week.

  7. I suppose I’ve been lucky in a way with waiting for the patch: my system had RRoD’d after an hour of playing Castle Crashers, so I haven’t been chomping at the bit for the patch since I’ve not had a system at all. I’ve just been wanting to play the game itself! According to UPS my new system is waiting for me at home, however, so I’ll finally be able to give the game a proper go! Thanks for your hard work on the patch, can’t wait to play some online games with the people of this community. Just don’t kick my butt too badly until I get some experience in! =)

  8. I am so lucky I’ll be at a spiritual retreat soon so when I come back there should be at least a week less I dont have to wait for the update. Heck, it might even be out when I come back. Can’t wait!

  10. Im honestly REALLY PISSED OFF that its taking this long to fix the game I paid for to have multiplayer in it.

    Im sure it will take you a month from release to have a patch in our (gamers) hands.

    This is a great game and I love it, its a shame something like this had to cripple such a great game.

    I would like a refund since the game was not delivered as promised, you have my email address if you should find it in your busy schedules to reply to me which im sure you wont.

  11. @ PreZ
    It says you can’t get a refund on all things you buy in marketplace. Also, they said that none of these things could not have been brought up during the testing and they did the best they could so… don’t be mad. Even if you probably got your memory erased you shouldn’t be. It was not their fault. If I lost all my stuff I might have been frustrated but not mad about it. Yes, there is a difference. They are testng it so thoroghly to make sure there are no problems so they don’t have to do it all over again. Be patient.

  13. @ PreZ
    You should pay more attention to the fine print before you buy things online, no matter where you get them. I’ve been blessed so far to have kept all of my memory. This really isn’t that big of a deal (concerning the online bugs). You should occupy your “pissed off time” towards something that actually matters. Go save a rain forest or something and then by the time you’re done, we can play some CC online. You have to realize that The Behemoth is a small company. It would be different if they had hundreds of games coming from their business every year, but they don’t. Cut them some slack.

    @johnb
    Thank you for the hard work and from everyone (that’s not PreZ-esque) in the CC Community, we appreciate you spending your life trying to settle all qualms and appease the crowd in a hectic time. PEACE OUT!

  14. The “No refunds” is typical with software, and part of the problem: you have economic incentives to push out product early and buggy.

    And I don’t believe that the problems with multiplayer “could not have been found during testing”. This is basic scalabity and network-implementation issues! Hard crashes, inability to join games, random failures when joining, etc, should all have been caught.

    This has to pass the whole Microsoft certification. It is supposed to have been tested.

    And a small team is no excuse. Look at Braid, a game with an even smaller budget and one programmer of note: There is only one “game blocking” bug of note: rewinding past fetching a piece on that level which was joined with another piece on the in-world jigsaw, and no hard-freeze bugs that I’ve heard of.

    Barring that, frankly speaking, the programming team should NOT have been sent to PAX: Yes, you’re a small company. But you have some non-programmers. You lost a week of development and testing, when it was clear before the developers left for PAX that the bugs were crippling! There is a reason the game is called “Castle CRASHERS”

  15. Small company or not, this could of been avoided with proper testing. There is alot of ways to test online, they could of had open beta testing.

    I agree with Prez and Nicholas on this. Imagine if RockBand 2 was released with the inability of the online play when its release when it was promised. People would be pissed.

    Big reason I got this game was to play ONLINE with my friends cuz it was promised and is in the game specifications and now i have to wait for a patch when who knows when its going to come out.

  17. I find it kind of funny people are so agitated they cannot play online. Go back about 10-15 years, online gaming didn’t even exist. We were still happy consumers who played with people locally or family members. Now with online, we expect too much from something.
    About Braid, Braid has no online save for leaderboards, Nicholas. That is a considerably huge difference in programming, as well as the fact Castle Crashers saves your characters, their progress, your weapons AND your animal orbs.

    They also went through 3 months of certification. That means they went through that game for bugs for a long time. Saying they didn’t test for them at the least is simply being asinine. Please consider that nothing is perfect on the first go.

    Also, John or Emil, those “custom boxes”, are they for all orders between your return to PAX and now? I’m anxiously awaiting my order, and if it includes the said time frame, I got something else to look forward to 😀

  18. I think “Code Monkeys” or “Cowboy Coders” would be a better term for the dev team. The art and writers are great. But slight crashes corrupting the whole save file? It takes more than a “learn C in 7 easy steps” to make a developer. The outright broken development is obvious.

    catch (Exception ex){
    //TODO: Make sure we don’t corrupt the whole save file here
    }

  20. I wanna play as the PINK knight from Castle Crashing The Beard! He can shoot rainbows and candy and stuff. Please make him downloadable in the future!!

  24. wow, Orange night came in the mail, amazing. was well worth the money. theres a video on youtube going around fast titled “castle crasher advertisement” so ive heard, im off to watch it now and see what the “fuss” is about.

    and to behemoth, the game is amazing and flawlass in my eyes, keep doing what you are doing!

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