Last time we dove into the Big List of Improvements and gave you the run down on what you can expect in the Legacy Collection. For this one we thought we’d do something different. We sat down with a few of the people behind the GemCraft Legacy Collection to ask what it was actually like bringing these three games back. Here’s what they said:
What was the first thing you wanted to fix when you started working on the Legacy Collection? Was there a specific annoyance from the original games that you knew had to go?
Tasselfoot (Producer, Armor Games): The lag in end-game situations. I remember how painful and slow it got in the original games, and my first and biggest priority was to make sure we improved performance for our mana farmers, min/max-ers, and endurance run champs.
Bringing three games into one collection must have meant some tough calls. What was the hardest decision, and what did you choose to leave alone on purpose?
Tass: The original goal was to leave most things as-is, which is how we normally handle legacy collections. But this project has been different, with significant input from the community. Their passion and suggestions really shaped the versions of these games that players will get to experience.
Ivan (QA, Armor Games): It is far more than just a port. Along with a community of passionate players, we did our best to modernize the games and make quality of life improvements consistent across all 3.
Is there a change that sounds small but that you think players will notice the most?
Tass: The two biggest to me are 9x speed and the various quick-swapping features in GemCraft 1. The games are long, and being able to speed things up even further is a life saver. And the original GemCraft is really rough on quality of life, so making it play friendlier is huge.
Ivan: There wasn’t really a small change. With every change we had to be very careful not to break things on any layer. Bringing achievements over 1-to-1 on Steam was a huge feat, but we wanted to stay consistent across all the games in the series.
Along with 9x speed, a small change that will make life so much easier is the quality of life feature that lets you place a gem into a tower or trap with a single click on an empty socket, as long as you have a gem in your inventory. It seems small, but it saves so many unnecessary click-hold-release actions.
What was the trickiest technical problem, and how did you solve it?
Terracotta Sombrero (Porting): There was a huge advantage to revisiting these games that simply couldn’t have been done when they were first released. For example, modern versions of Adobe AIR and their GPU acceleration make a huge difference to running the games in fullscreen in a way their release-time counterparts couldn’t, and more powerful average hardware lets us experiment with higher resolutions and more.
The original codebase being split across two versions of ActionScript was a big hurdle when it came to communicating with Steam. GemCraft 1 has no way of communicating with the wrapper outside of some fun trickery, encoding values in the game window size and scale. That’s why, when you refresh your Steam stats, the screen goes black for one frame in this game. GemCraft: Chapter Zero and Labyrinth were in ActionScript 3 and much easier to work with, since they can talk to Steam natively.
Another big hurdle was hooking up every single amulet to a Steam achievement, which would have meant manually entering hundreds of things into Steam’s backend. Luckily there’s a browser extension called Tampermonkey that can be scripted to automate simple web tasks. It turned a potentially dozens-of-hours job into a fun-to-watch 20-minute automation. Having an achievement for every in-game achievement definitely makes these games immensely satisfying to play.
Scaling the resolution of a heavily mouse-driven game also meant rewriting how many of the inputs were handled across all the games, making coordinate systems global rather than local. That led to many late nights working with Ivan on crazy one-off problems and edge cases, but in the end I think we got it nailed, and the games look incredible.
The optimisations to avoid late game crawling were mostly done with help from the community, especially Bill Wilson, who knew the game inside out (sometimes a little bit TOO inside out). That led to several new ways of rendering and batching enemies that make a huge performance difference.
Overall, compared to many other classic Flash games, the GemCraft games were surprisingly well organised and written much more professionally, with classes and techniques that made a lot of the rewriting simpler. There’s credit due there, it wasn’t all new stuff.
What do you hope players feel when they come back to these games?
Tass: Nostalgia.
Ivan: Three games that started a series, each one gradually increasing and improving all aspects of gameplay, gathered into a beautiful collection. The sound of the first thunder strike on the title menu, placing green gems into traps and watching enemies get poisoned, watching the first fragment of gem color being fired at the enemy and preventing them from reaching the wizard tower. Ahh, nostalgia.
What’s your personal favorite GemCraft memory, or your favorite gem combo?
Tass: When Chapter Zero released, I was still early in my career making videos. Knowing how big the game was going to be, based on the success of the first one, I rushed to be the first person to get content onto YouTube. I must have spent 25 hours in the first two days of release beating the game as fast as possible to get some videos live. As far as I know, I was the first person to beat it!
Ivan: GemCraft was my first encounter with the TD genre and the main reason I was dragged into the world of online flash games. GemCraft: The Forgotten was brilliant at making players want more, and kept me playing just to get one more skill point and maximize my score.
GemCraft: Chapter Zero was a wish come true: an endless game with so much replay value, and it is still my favorite game of the series and of the TD genre. When it came out I didn’t have internet at home, so it was the first flash game I downloaded a .swf file for, just to play locally on Windows XP, from the built-in Internet Explorer. I remember having to download an Adobe Flash Player plug-in just to make it work. It is the only single-player game in which I have spent over a thousand hours, trying to get the world map to glow and be perfect. The concept was brilliant: an endless way to keep playing and beating modes and maximizing the score, then improving and coming back to do better in a loop. Compared to the first game it had big improvements, like game modes, summoning enemies via bombing, shrines, extra hidden levels and so much more.
GemCraft: Labyrinth changed the freedom of how you manage and select the modes you play in, with totally customizable options that let players choose exactly what they want. It improved the length of endless mode and brought new mana farming techniques, improved visuals, and many other memorable moments like the Shadow boss, which has a simple but beautiful aesthetic.
For me this was more than a project, it was a wish come true. As QA, I invested far more than just making sure the game was stable. I wanted to make it shine in every aspect.
Daniel (CEO, Armor Games): You always remember the first, and the original game left a gem-sized hole in my heart, so I can’t wait to see that one return. But the other two in the collection leave me with just as fond memories.
[dynamiclink href="https://store.steampowered.com/app/4207990/GemCraft__Legacy_Collection/"]
Huge thanks to everyone in the community whose feedback and testing shaped this collection, we couldn't have done this without you.
If you haven’t already, a wishlist and a follow here on Steam makes a huge difference to a small team like us. The game drops NEXT WEEK and we couldn’t be more excited to see it in your hands.
Catch you on the 21st!
The teams at Armor Games Studios and Game in a Bottle.
