What happened to development on Arcade & the other major games?

How the fuck is that a TLDR?

23 Likes

When posts are longer than your essays…

just Why?

While I see what you’re saying and very much want to see more gamemodes / long-term features such as Arcade, I disagree that they should have more priority. You made some good points and I feel similarly about content, but here are some reasons that I don’t share your views:

  1. In most cases of these features being stopped halfway, it’s because some developers moved onto them after finishing their previous tasks. For example, when the devs put a large focus on the casino, the art was done before the gameplay was. Because of this, the artists were able to focus on other things, whether it be starting future features, updating models, or if they have nothing else in mind, making new maps. By the time the programmers finish their tasks, development will have seemingly ‘stopped’ for some tasks, but in reality it is simply prepared for the programmers to get to whenever the schedule allows for it.

  2. I personally am like you in that I care more about gameplay features than off-hand stuff. With that said, I know many others appreciate the one-off content like the laser projector or condo enhancements. They can’t just throw condos to the side to make a gameworld, and I respect that they take the time to develop all portions of the game equally. Plus, in many cases in the daily logs, the devs focus on fixing bugs which is definitely a priority. If Pixeltail is releasing a condo update next with tools and everything, why not just hammer out some condo bugs that they find along the way. No, I don’t care about the media player, but considering how long people have complained about it, one day spent fixing it won’t be a waste.

  3. The dev team is rather small and creation of BIG activities like gameworlds is a daunting task. Yes, it would be nice if they could pour all of their time into finishing Zombie Massacre, but they are people too. I would get bored if I made the same thing continuously for so long, so breaks to work on other things make perfect sense to me. I don’t mind it taking a long time if it means that the gameworlds will be better made at launch. I don’t think we’ll need to wait 1-2 years either :slight_smile:

4 Likes

From what I’ve seen, it seems the devs each work on what they feel like working on, which leads to smaller, often pointless and underused content being focused on instead of the big features that could boost the player count quite a bit, as the big features would take just an insane time to create.

Take the roller coaster for example. Very few people use it (surprise surprise, considering it’s just a cart with your character in it moving on your screen, with literally no gameplay), very few people returned back to the game because of it, and it still took a lot of time and resources to develop. I know it was way less time and resources than, let’s say, the arcade would take, but if the dev team dropped the development of new maps and smaller features and finally focused on one major project at a time, finishing it before moving onto the next one, that’d be great.

It’s not like we’re going to lose a lot of players by not releasing smaller updates from time to time. Can’t lose players that aren’t there, am I right?

1 Like

You forgot Little Crusaders :"(

I don’t think that the game modes are Tower Unite’s biggest appeal. While they are big parts of the game, the main appeal of the game is the plaza.

Think about it, would you ever buy a full priced game that was as simple as the game modes in Tower Unite? Everything in Tower Unite ultimately goes to the plaza, and am glad that Pixeltail is working on making the plaza more fun to be in. Even small stuff like music for the plaza and having different plazas for the season will greatly improve the game.

Really, the plaza has improved a lot, back when i first got Tower Unite (It was during the Little Crusaders update) there was little reason to go to the plaza, the only reason the plaza would be filled in the first place would be because people afk on the slots for hours on end. Now today the plaza is a lot more lively and has more stuff to do. They added 2 new shops and made the stray a lot easier to find, they added three major plaza features, (The roller coaster, Laser Tag, and the plaza events) A more lively plaza with ghosts and soon to be added globe chat, a Halloween plaza with its own events and a lot more little stuff that i can’t list.

On the contrary, people voting and posting suggestions and bugs influences our choices greatly.

This has been stated quite a few times, but we don’t always work on the same projects at the same time. Our artists will often work on maps on the side while they await our programmers. Our programmers are pretty busy right now. Zak is busy working on Global Chat, Workshop, and Arcade which are all very large projects in of themselves. Deniz is working on migrating our engine to the latest version, which is also a massive task (and we definitely need to upgrade our engine version). Foohy is busy with school at the moment. I have been focusing on Halloween and I took a week off and just came back today. Halloween was a large update that included lots of great tests of our plans for the Plaza (such as the minigames and character events).

However, we have been prioritizing Zombie Massacre for quite some time now, if you’ll look at the previous logs the artists are going at it (Search results for 'zombie massacre category:62 order:latest' - PixelTail Games - Creators of Tower Unite!).

Bug fixes need to be solved quickly, though, as they effect players right at this moment.

There’s some pretty bad bugs still in Virus and Little Crusaders which effect the player counts there. Planet Panic is going to be remade.

Game Worlds take a long amount of time to make. They’re large separate games that have completely new mechanics that have to be made, tested, and iterated on. We also need maps, music, and weapon models.

But, again, we’re working on it. I will be finishing up some more Zombie Massacre gameplay soon.

I have been working on Halloween. I took a week off and then came back to solve bugs on Saturday.

Media player is a very popular and heavily used feature in our game and the bugs that its been having has been there for 8+ months. It’s quite embarrassing and I wanted to solve a few of them after I got back from my break. It is a feature we advertise and I expect it to be in a better state than it is. The fact that turning off and on the media player completely breaks its use is pretty awful and something that I feel should be resolved sooner than later (like I said it’s been several months).

We gauge how popular things are by our suggestions and Trello votes and from community feedback on the forums and the servers. There are many sections to the game that need to be attended to and that’s why I’ll often hop around fixing bugs that have been reported.

I believe I personally talked to you about Fishing, if not, my mistake.

Fishing was delayed due to the Steam Inventory changes that Valve required us to make. We had to put everything on hold for a couple weeks to solve this inventory issue before Fishing could continue because Fishing heavily uses the inventory for its functionality.

After that delay, Halloween came up. It’s a serious of events that just unfortunately delayed it. I am currently (and most likely for the future) the only programmer working on Fishing. Foohy helped me out with the inventory side of things, but the gameplay is all me. So I’ve been doing prototypes here and there, and solving the issues. I’ve actually been asking our artists to finish up some more of the Fishing items, so it’s not really that far off from being completed. Krionikal also needs to finish up the weapon animations as well (which he got some solid progress on).

Things like this happen in game development and we try to avoid it.

I would like to explain the Roller Coaster. The Roller Coaster was an Indiegogo promised feature (literally the first thing we promised to add) and we don’t want to break any promises. We knew the Roller Coaster was not going to bring in a lot of players when making it (which is why it was so low priority). I do plan on adding a minigame aspect to it one day.

However, going back to what I was explaining earlier, the Roller Coaster was completed several months before it was actually released. We just sat on it for awhile because there was a major bug with the seat system that greatly effected the Roller Coaster (basically you couldn’t sit in the seats at all so there was no point in releasing it), but everything else with the Roller Coaster was done. Since it was lower priority than everything else, it was just stuck like that while the seat system was upgraded and improved. After several debugging builds (each take 4-5 hours), Foohy figured out the problem and then Roller Coaster was quickly finished off.

We have been heavily focused on gameplay additions. The whole Plaza minigame system was a massive task and now it’s done and we can add minigames to the Plaza. My plan is to add quite a few Plaza minigames.

Remodeling stuff that’s already in-game is the purpose of our Early Access project. We’re not finished with a lot of the models and they’re gonna need to be remodeled or redesigned at some point. Optimization requires us to retouch existing assets all the time.

I’d say if we got a lot of things in first without having some sort of quality bar, it would deter our players from playing the game. I personally don’t want to rush games out and then have to go back and adjust so much. It would be better to have good first impressions. A great example of ruining first impressions is Planet Panic. That game was rushed out the door and it’s totally noticable. Planet Panic is very much a prototype and no where near up to the standards of the other games. When I come back to Planet Panic, I’m going to be starting from scratch basically. So, yeah, rushing is often bad.

Arcade has seen development. We don’t check off things on Trello unless they are completely finished. Arcade models are finished (which was recent) and the API is nearly complete. I have finished the non-arcade API gameplay base code as well for games like the basketball. Arcade is definitely a huge project, though. We don’t want to release half the arcade, we want to release the entire thing because first impressions are huge to us and releasing something half done will just lessen the impact of the feature.


I don’t want to sound too proud of our project, but TU is unlike many other Early Access games. We’re not making a single genre of gameplay, or a single world/universe. TU is a combination of lots of different games with different game mechanics, different moving parts, and multiplayer networking.

There’s so many aspects of the game and so many directions it can go.

There’s people who love building Condo stuff and want more Condo tools and furniture, people who love games and want more Game Worlds, people who love the Plaza and want more Plaza activities/games, people who love collecting things and want achievements, people who love socializing and expressing themselves and want clothing/emotes, people who love sharing media and canvas images who want more of that, and there’s even people who want to make their own items through Workshop. We’re trying to get through all of what people want and we work as much as we can on TU.

To sum it up: I understand and we’re definitely prioritizing new games.

17 Likes

god dang i dont understand why they are so many people complaining about how they’re developing things

why cant we just let them do their thing

they’re the ones actually developing the game after all

We haven’t had a community poll on the forums since April
Also lets look at the Trello votes:

Additional hotbar for weapon inventory: 21 votes
Inventory portable tools: 25 votes
Fishing: 209 votes
Steam Workshop Support: 228 votes
Arcard: 373 Votes

Have you guys ever considered hiring another programmer?

“Bug fixes need to be solved quickly, though, as they effect players right at this moment.” -You

@macdguy This is a point that I have also been making for quite awhile now.

I don’t really see the point in pointing out the flaws in a paragraph besides being rude. Please don’t tell somebody to shut it.

3 Likes

On that first point, he said it influences their decisions, NOT dictate them. Ultimately the devs still decide based on what they feel is most important.

Second point: They just added Deniz to the team super recently. I don’t think it’s time to hire more programmers.

Didn’t know Deniz was new. Thanks for the info

1 Like

The point wasn’t to be rude, it was to voice concerns and ciriticisms of a game he paid for

Community polls are not the only ways we decide things. They actually aren’t as useful as the individual posts and comments I take in everyday. But, yes, they are useful. Right now we’re working on features people have shown support for, so at this time we don’t have any need for a community poll just yet.

I explained in my previous post that Zak has been working on Steam Workshop (you can see in his daily logs), I explained the delay for Fishing, and Arcade has had progress even if it’s all behind the scenes (most of Zak’s stuff is). So we’re prioritizing the popular things.

The Inventory stuff takes about a week or two to implement (and don’t require artists or many other people; it’s basically Foohy and myself), where as the Workshop, Fishing, and Arcade are massive projects that take months (and require pretty much everyone on our team).

Condo builders have not seen an update to their tools since grid snap (which was https://trello.com/c/iZeDA2Nr/195-casino-update-0120). After play testing and getting feedback from people (and reading all the old forum posts), I decided it would be nice to have a quick Condo tool update. I haven’t touched it since Halloween and the Plaza Events, as it’s much much lower priority.

We hired Deniz very recently. Programmers are tough to find and very expensive to hire. We are looking for a gameplay programmer, but the requirements are quite high.

Which is why I specifically pointed out why I worked on bugs. I have Little Crusaders bug fixes planned to be worked on this week.

You should read my explanation for the Roller Coaster again:

6 Likes

Maybe you shouldn’t call people shills and tell them to shut it if your not trying to be rude.

12 Likes

Jeez, why do people need to feel so entitled to demand things or control how devs do their jobs. Yeah, we all paid for the game, but does anyone stop and consider that without them you wouldn’t be able to buy the game or enjoy any of it’s features in the first place?
The dev team has full rights to do what they feel is needed, and and honestly I think that some of the smaller stuff should be pushed first. Finishing the big things and still having a messy, buggy game afterwards won’t help anything.

10 Likes

Yep. Exactly this. Amen to that.

1 Like

I believe I personally talked to you about Fishing, if not, my mistake.

That would not be me, must be someone else.

There’s some pretty bad bugs still in Virus and Little Crusaders which effect the player counts there. Planet Panic is going to be remade.

I don’t play LC myself (since I don’t get how it works and could never hit the dragon ever) but I never had any issues with Virus beyond what I believe is latency causing people you run over on your screen still not turning into zombies, and I played that mode a fair amount.

A great example of ruining first impressions is Planet Panic. That game was rushed out the door and it’s totally noticable

I thought Planet Panic is fun, it has that goofy sense of fun that doesn’t feel serious, but unbalanced teams is the main issue (1v2, 2v3, etc is not doable really), and unbalanced teams was the only reason we (person who plays with me) didn’t play it past a few test runs.

When I come back to Planet Panic, I’m going to be starting from scratch basically

I don’t think you should do that though, it’s a cute game mode that is amusing! As mentioned, Team balance being uneven is one of 2 main issues I think. The maps could be more wacky and not be flat and so linear which is the only other issue I feel. Perhaps some lifts to get back to base, jumps, half-pipes, that kinda stuff - make it a wacky game :3 It’s more of a map design & team balance issue than the game goal and design.

and the API is nearly complete

Most of your players have no idea what this kind of lingo means (and especially what is usually posted under Zak’s daily log - don’t take that the wrong way, but saying something in common terms like models are nearly complete, or functionality is nearly complete, would mean so much more, just as examples. They are so hard to understand I just skip reading his)

I don’t want to sound too proud of our project, but TU is unlike many other Early Access games. We’re not making a single genre of gameplay, or a single world/universe.
There’s so many aspects of the game and so many directions it can go.

That becomes a big pro and con. DDR & an Overcooked style game would go so well into here just as examples (I would love to pay for additional games like these to be added down the line that aren’t part of the original plan. I know you don’t want to do DLC stuff, but you guys need money and I imagine most would love to see extra things come to the game, given that potential).

I do want to point a good reference of a game that tried to do too much (ARK Survival), by branching into too much, they had subpar results across the board and nothing turned out great, and some stuff dropped even, and what remains is stuff that feels only partially finished.

It is a double edged sword to cover all those bases, and perhaps it results in certain things remaining in a state of limbo? Focusing on so many different branches with only 8ish regular staff and a few PT staff is what is a bit worrying. Would it perhaps help your quality and focus to do segmented work from here on after fixing those things (IE: completing all the game mode related stuff > Plaza stuff > Condo stuff > Extra features)? I don’t know how you guys are for business sense, but organization helps so much with efficiency and goals. I believe it would help with the quality output too by maintaining focus on very specific objectives, rather than worrying about having to work on condos for a few days, then jump to decorations, then back to games, etc. Just a quality of life suggestion to help out.

I would like to continue the suggest/request and emphasize the Arcade feature (and it also lines up with that poll from way back). If it could get the majority focus till completion, that would offer us something new for a fair time, and be there for the Holidays possibly? (Rather than a temporary event) Given how popular the Casino is, I think the Arcade shares in similar style of gameplay and offers the most to do, given that it shows about 13ish games?

How the **** is that a TLDR?

When you go through college, you get used to writing, at least in the field of study I did. I went through 4 years for a BBA and we had to write 10-15 pages often lol. You’ll get there someday, it isn’t that hard to write several thousand words quickly once you are used to it.

I like to be incredibly detailed and thorough, especially in providing feedback & info to developers. People who tend to write a lot tend to care quite heavily about something, versus a 2 sentence feedback that you see on so many EA games that lack depth or reasoning.

1 Like

That is actually the wrong mindset for EA games. Being EA, they want feedback - good & bad. They want to know what people care about, don’t care about, etc. If they wanted to do their own thing entirely, the game would not be EA. The best thing for a game is when it is equal parts dev & community. In TU’s case, this is even more true given the style of game it is.

What is important is that it is detailed and constructive, not resorting to names, etc. Freedom of speech is important. This is something they are quite fortunate with, as most other EA games I play the feedback gets harsh. Here, it never does from what I see.

Using ARK Survival briefly for an example, the lack of communication there is what was their downfall with the customers, during EA, AND after as well. By not listening much to the community feedback, they are hit with harsh criticism daily, ticking off their customers, and a large portion of people stopped playing because of stupid decisions. (I myself only play to participate in their contests for example), or it would be uninstalled.

1 Like

Planet Panic has so many issues that it basically needs to be remade. But that doesn’t mean the whole gameplay feel will change. Judging by the trello card, it’ll be even wackier than it is now.

https://trello.com/c/JUWYtXem/242-make-planet-panic-great-again

But between all the issues and the one map available, there’s a lot keeping people from playing it.

See this thread for some of the issues with the gamemode: