Hi concerned user, also known as icebat_gaming47.
First off, I love GMTower. I wouldn’t have poured all the time and effort and love into it if I didn’t. I still play GMTower all the time. I play it with my wife, whom I first met on GMTower. I play it with her and her friends and my friends. I cannot put into words how much it means to me. GMTower lead me on the path to becoming a real game developer. It was the sole reason I went to college for video game development. It is the sole reason I am married, I am happy, and why I love making video games. It’s a HUGE part of my life. I say this, with the hope that you understand where I come from.
GMod is a dead end. I’ve been working on GMod stuff since GMod 9 and I gotta say, I’m tired of it. I’ve had to deal with it breaking, it working wonderfully, and all it’s wonderful limitations. But it’s not just the engine that makes it a dead end or the fact that it’s often broken. It’s the fact that it’s a mod of a game. See, when I put all my work into a mod of a game, I can’t really show that off to people. I can’t have people install it and have fun right away. I have to tell them that my game I’ve been working on is behind 40+ workshop addons (after explaining what workshop is), behind a game/mod (that you have to pay for to play it), and that 90% of the content is just Half-Life 2. Great, that leads me nowhere in life. This is actually really important to me.
My goal in life is to become a wonderful game developer. I can’t do that by behind a mod of a mod of a game.
So, why would we make Tower Unite? As I said previously, GMTower is everything to me. I literally cannot stop thinking about how to improve it. I walk around in shopping malls or hotels and obsess over what I should add to GMTower from them. And with Lobby 2, we did a lot. A lot more than I could have ever imagined. It got me thinking, why? Why would we keep creating this wonderful thing inside of GMod? The answer is simple and always true: the fans. Everyone loved what we did! We were used to GMod, we mastered it all, we figured out the solutions that weren’t always in front of us. Wait a second… we became game developers! But we were trapped. There were things we couldn’t do. I know we could actually do them, but we were constantly being held back by limitations.
We tried making a few games that weren’t related to GMTower as standalone games. There’s at least 5 or 6 games that just didn’t make it. Developers lost interest or the games just sucked. After the failure of one of the standalone games, I would instantly go back to GMTower development. It was my happy place. Soon, I was convinced, we had to take GMTower out of GMod and make it a standalone game. That was the game we had to make!
So we (the developers) mustered up all we could and flew down to meet each other in real life, for most the first time we’ve met in real life. We drafted up a plan. We drafted up a Kickstarter. We picked our brains, we yelled, we stressed over every little detail and word we were going to say. And then we filmed, we edited, we did all that we could to make a trailer for the Kickstarter for the game we’ve always been wanting to make. And… it didn’t get funded.
Disheartened, we stumbled about for a brief moment. Then we heard the fans again. They still wanted what we had. So we did it again. We learned from our mistakes and started another campaign on Indiegogo. Going in this time knowing our fans would back us once again, we were successful.
Whew, so where does that lead us, and what is the point of all of this? The point is: we wouldn’t have done all this for nothing. We are putting literally everything that we can into this project. From the beginning and till the end our goal is to make GMTower a proper game. That means GMTower in all its glory, nothing less, but definitely more.
Yes, GMTower currently works pretty seamlessly. And yes, the alpha of Tower Unite is not ready yet. But you will see it, you will love it, because if you won’t - I won’t. Everyone at PixelTail Games wants to make the game they love.
We aren’t going to take away the memories, we are just transforming them into new memories!
Look, that last line was cheesy, but I really do mean this. I will miss GMTower just as everyone else will. Maybe too much. But, Tower Unite isn’t better than GMTower. It IS GMTower just unshackled from every limitation.
Yours truly and honestly,
Macklin
PS: We’re not going to delete your message, ever.
PPS: It will close down April 2016 when Tower Unite launches. We’re gonna throw a huge party. I hope you’ll be there. I will be.