Castle Crashers is completely completed

Castle Crashers is completely completed!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I feel really great about how the final product has come out after playing through a few times last night. I’m very proud of what our team was able to accomplish. This game is undoubtedly the largest 360 XBLA game that has any kind of story; Large in scope, takes hours and hours to go through with your buddies. Lots of little treasures and secrets hiding around the levels, many unlockable characters all with a different feel, and lastly, no real weak spots in the game that I can foresee haunting me for the rest of my life. 🙂

Now before anyone goes to turn on their 360 to give it a look please note that it takes a couple months at the very least from this point. It has to go through all the required hoops of certification/final testing & all that jazz before it will actually become available on the service. Because of this, amongst other things, there is no actual release date that we can give anyone right now. However I have to say it’s a good feeling know that the crashers are working their way into the world as you are reading this, isn’t it?

I have included new screenshots of a couple levels being played above. Here you can see danger in the dreaded ice arena, as well as the war in the bear village (this was also posted in the media section ).

I (and the rest of the team I am certain) want to thank you all for the patience you have shown as we worked on this project. We too were anxious for the game to be finished – but we just could not rush and end up risking the quality! The fan art and the amazing support we’ve received while working on this game has really uplifted our spirits and helped create something better than we would have been able to otherwise. You guys are awesome — thank you very much!!!!!

We are STILL MAKING UPDATES to this devblog! We will still be showing characters, animal orbs, videos, weapons, and other updates as usual, so don’t think we’re wrapping this up!

-dan

Molten metal is hot

Trial One- To start off, I went to Linday’s Books to get basic info on how to cast bigger than jewelry sized metal objects. If you like to build stuff, Lindsay’s is great. Just need to find time to build that backyard sawmill so that we can increase the size of our office because we are busting at the seams!

My friend Alan, who let us use his shop a while back (remember the trophy bases?) got inspired to cast the Castle Crashers figurines because his son is a huge Behemoth fan. Alan was looking for something to experiment with bronze casting and the palm sized Castle knight was just right for the first experiments. When cast, the knight weighs in at about 10 ounces, so he has a nice heft to him.

First thing is of course a great calculator. I’m not really sure why, but it makes it feel super scientific since we are going to be working with molten metal heated to nearly 2000 degrees. In the background you can see one of the knights who has been drawn and quartered.

castlecrashersbronze_calculator.jpg

Usually to cast something of this size you’d use the lost wax method of casting. This means the sculptor would sculpt a model out of clay, make a mold out of plaster, then cast in wax. The wax copy of the sculpture then has sprues attached to it so the bronze can flow to all parts of the sculpture.

Once the sprues are attached and a funnel like indentation is made, the parts are embedded in plaster contained by an iron cylinder. Then it is in to the oven to bake out the wax.

In order to save time, Alan decided to pioneer the “lost knight” method of casting, where sprues are added to the knight figurine and it is cast directly into the plaster. He figured since it will be baking out for a while at 1900 degrees, it wouldn’t matter if it was PVC or wax…
castlecrashersbronze_investment.jpg