Castle Crashers developer The Behemoth have been rather silent of late, especially on the front of their upcoming Xbox 360 Arcade platformer BattleBlock Theater. They broke the silence this week to show that, while there is still no release window for the highly anticipated follow up, they wanted to promise that they are still at work on it. While that really isn't news in itself, their recent developer diary does give some interesting insights into how they create their games and decide when they are ready for release. The dev diary pretty much states that while they like the game, it does't feel quite right and also updates us on the state of the small development studio.

What's interesting is that they felt that way with the original Castle Crashers for a long time. The Behemoth wants to tweak BattleBlock Theater until it of the same level of quality as their other releases. This sentiment is completely understandable as Castle Crashers had a very long development cycle where they tweaked and played with it until it worked.

Before this blog post, I hadn't even realized that The Behemoth had originally intended for Castle Crashers to be a GameCube title. Of course they switched it to XBLA (and later PSN), and revealed that there are over 2.6 million people on the Castle Crashers leaderboards. The Behemoth clearly wants that same level of success for BattleBlock Theater and it is hard to blame them. As a gamer I don't mind waiting for a company to make a game better. Castle Crashers was an absolute blast and I am really looking forward to rescuing the prisoners of BattleBlock Theater, regardless of whether I get to do so this year or next.

Finally, if your're curious, The Behemoth also posted a video of what Castle Crashers looked like in Beta, before they tweaked it to "add [more] awesomeness."

http://www.youtube.com/v/WUcIBg6Zq_Q?version=3&hl=en_US&rel=0

After seeing this, I can say I'm glad they took the time to tweak Castle Crashers. This early footage looks surprisingly awkward, and the game eventually became one of the most refined experiences on the Xbox, Arcade or otherwise.