We aren’t done with Tower Unite yet.
Game development is an evolving process that involves multiple people working together in a team. We also have goals that we have to complete to get to technical tasks to finish the game in a matter.
Tower Unite has changed a LOT since the Indiegogo, implementing features requested by the community more times than I can even count. We’ve changed gameplay designs and gameplay goals multiple times as we find new avenues to improve the gameplay for everyone and we have changed as people over the years. We’ve gotten better as developers as we continue to develop, which opens up new ideas that we couldn’t have thought of over 5 years ago.
Personally, circling things on an Indiegogo and saying “look - they haven’t completed this or that” is incredibly frustrating to me. So I can go through what’s going on for each circled thing.
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Wings. We have these now.
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Rollerblades. This ended up being a technical challenge that we decided would be way out of scope of our game right now. Considering we’ve added tons of other vehicles that weren’t planned on indiegogo, we feel this is still fulfilled. We also have a skateboard item coming soon.
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Parties. We are working on the backend changes for this to happen. This backend change is 99% done as of this post. We have to make our own entire server masterlist system and server to make this happen with the current condo system that has evolved since the indiegogo.
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Minigames. We have lots of minigames. We also added minigames that weren’t originally planned, and brought back many from GMod Tower.
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VR support. VR has changed a LOT since Vive and Oculus days and we also are still working on the game. Adding VR is a huge task and would delay every other feature, which is why we haven’t been interested in tackling it just yet. There’s also way less adoption for VR right now, but it’s changing still every year. Adding VR requires rewriting a lot of the core game. That said, I did just recently get an Index and have been playing around with VR in Unreal recently…
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Multiplayer emotes (high fives). This is actually pretty difficult and also one of those features that is pushed in the back burner right now.
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Media services. We ran into an issue where Steam changed their browser protocol, causing several codecs to no longer be supported. We have a lot of other technical issues to tackle before coming back to this, but we also find that YouTube and Soundcloud support is pretty solid and the most used (though Twitch support is highly desired).
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The Plaza connection. Again with the Party system, we are working on the backend for this to work. You can track it here: https://trello.com/c/lIIyx8aK/563-improved-plaza-connectivity
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Player Customization. With the Indiegogo, we did not have the workshop player models figured out yet, so we wanted to come up with other ways to customize at the time. With workshop, people can customize their avatars in ways that were not originally imagined. You can adjust some features for the base player models and we do plan on remodeling those player models after we finish more of the NPC characters first.
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Casino games. Blackjack, Roulette and 5 Card Draw are here: https://trello.com/c/YiTB5XHZ/557-casino-phase-2
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Player counts. This is from Indiegogo over 5 years ago. We have pushed the player counts as much as possible, but we’re also finding limitations of the engine. There is also gameplay balancing and design.
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Genres. I really disagree here, but this is your personal opinion.
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Dueling. Dueling artwork is complete. When we did a recent prioritization survey and Dueling was voted on and ended up being last in the list. So we adjusted accordingly. October 2020 Priority Survey Results
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Trading. After years of running Tower we have found that trading would open a digital economy for the items in Tower and that’s not something we are comfortable with.
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Microtransactions. We have not had any microtransactions. Indiegogo rewards are not microtransactions.
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Monorail. We disabled the monorail because we have bigger plans for the island that it leads to. Considering this also was voted very low with the community, we have put less priority on this feature and have put more priorities on higher desired features such as the Arcade.
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The Kamikaze attraction was planned to be added, but we need to recode the Kamikaze attraction for replication purposes and general optimizations first. It’s something we learned as we have developed this game. It’s simply too expensive to put in the game as is and we have been busy tackling other tasks first.
We’ve added lots of new features that weren’t planned on Indiegogo. We even implemented most of the community voted on features for the Indiegogo stretch goals: Poll: Stretch Goal - COMMUNITY PICKS! [RESULTS ANNOUNCED!]
All in all, the game is not finished. We aren’t finished with it. We aren’t slowing down with development with it either. We have been constantly working on the game each week since we started. We have been very transparent with what we’ve been developing and have been giving weekly developer logs detailing everything we work on each week, along with goals for where the game is headed towards.
There’s a lot of progress on upcoming features and we’re working towards getting them out as soon as possible.