Crystal realms yearly review 2024

Hey everyone! Instead of the weekly devlog I normally do, I decided to make a post about some of the accomplishments we made this year, and the predictions I have for the coming year.

2024 accomplishments

Community
The Crystal Realms community has grown a lot this year! A year ago the discord server had less than 50 members, and now it has over 633 members! There are also 1500 registered accounts in the game, and over 35,000 worlds have been created. Huge thanks to everyone who helped promote the game in any way.

Android/iOS version
This year I started working on the android/iOS version. This was a very big task, because I was rewriting the client from scratch in a new game engine. Although it has not released yet, it is gonna release very soon.

Player resize
A very common complaint of the game was that the player character was too tall, so I decided to make the player one block smaller. This was a very big task since it required me to not only reanimate the player, but also reanimate every single clothing item in the game.

New user interface
The ui has had multiple improvements in the past year. And a ton of effort has been put into making it look amazing for the mobile release.

This is for example how the shop looked like a year ago:

Then it got redesigned to look like this:

And this is how it will roughly look like in the alpha 1.0 release:

Redesigning the ui to be HD instead of pixel art was also a huge task, but I think it payed off really well and makes the game look more "finished".

2025 predictions

Alpha release
In last year's yearly post (on discord) I predicted the alpha would release at the end of the summer. This obviously hasn't happened, I think it is mostly because some unexpected big tasks started popping up, like rewriting the client in rust and resizing the player. But the alpha release is now finally close to being finished, and I am very excited to share it with you all.

Community growth
I am also expecting the community of the game to grow a lot this year, just like last year. The mobile release will bring in a lot of new players, and the game being more polished over all will also help. The server has even been upgraded to be able to handle a big number of players.

Faster updates
Right now the update schedule of crystal realms is about once every 3 months. But I think this year it might be faster since I will be working on the game full time, and I won't be needing to focus on the mobile version anymore. There is even a chance that another developer will join the team if the game starts making enough money.

Hopefully 2025 will be another great year for Crystal Realms!