Don’t get me wrong. I love shooters and racing games. What I was getting at was that they specifically mentioned that each of the 10 games will be a different genres and further down that very page, that’s immediately proven false.
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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.
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What exactly is the Party system, I’ve heard about it for years now but I don’t think I’ve ever learned what it is. Is it a public announcement for hosting Condos?
VR is a nightmare to make, but my god if it ever happens it would be amazing.
Obviously beyond Technical difficulties, there’s also the task of translating most of the game into VR, though I have had some ideas so maybe I’ll make a write-up on those…
If it still exists, could it be possible as a mega-monolith Condo item? Being the high-tier prize (like the Wowozela) of Arcade Phase 2. That would remove the strain from (already heavy) Plazas and make it an optional and coveted Condo item. I would love to expand my Fairgrounds in my House Condo with another attraction.
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I just want to clarify some things about the projects I work on:
The Fresh store is actually going to be the HQ for the cooking system. It is where you will buy ingredients etc. Now it’s at a state where we won’t have to work on that later, when we get to the cooking system.
Also, I can work on/add the monorail at any time, but it just hasn’t been a high priority because to be completely honest, most people don’t care about it.
The rail shooting gallery, as far as development resources, is 80% an environment art project and 20% code. It’s also a monumental task. So to tackle this one, I’ve been working on it in piecemeal here and there. Once more important features are completed and the programmers are ready to tackle this, 80% of the work will have been completed. Which include things like the exterior that I just finished, the wild west area that is finished, the haunted house area that is almost finished, and the loading platform and 50s alien town that will be worked on next.
A lot of the small art passes on the side are done on my own time. For example, the course wall updates, which add a great layer of visual polish to the minigolf maps, is something I work on on my own time on the weekends.
As far as more casino games, I will take the L on that one. I just haven’t worked on it because I’ve been working on other things, but it’s becoming more clear with time that people really want more casino games. I’ll get to work on the art for the next batch of casino games very soon, so that the programmers can implement them.
I’ll be completely frank on this last bullet point. I have spent a lot of time polishing the art of existing areas because I have grown as an artist over time. I think this is very important to have a quality, cohesive art style to the game that evokes a sense of friendliness and happiness. I simply was much less skilled as an artist at the beginning of the project. If I was a seasoned developer from the start, things would have happened much more quickly. However, I was a young college student just starting out back then. It’s also worth noting that I am not even educated in this field; my degree is in electrical engineering.
If anyone has any questions about the priorities of the art team, please, ask away; I am an open book.
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In GMod Tower, the way it functioned was pretty much, you would start a party and there would be some tick marks that you would choose on what will be present at your party (ex: piano, drinks, movies, games.) Upon starting the party, you would get deducted around 250 GMC and everyone would get a notification telling them that there is a party starting in whatever suite/condo number you were in, and you would be able to teleport straight to that suite/condo. I forget how long parties lasted for, but they lasted for about 5 - 10 minutes or so? Parties were a fun experience.
It would still need to be rewritten. We’ve learned a lot since then and the entire thing needs to be redone honestly.
I’m well aware of all of this. Way to complete miss the point of my post. I was actually really hopeful when I saw you responded but I now couldn’t be more disappointed.
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This is a question I’ve had since Chilly Billy and Virgil.
Are there plans to replace the default human player models (or at least add new stylized equivalents)?
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What else do you want me to explain? I’m explaining where the features are and what’s going on with them.
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Why did you make the post then?
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That’s actually been known for awhile. It is planned
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We know the game is unfinished. It’s a lot of work. My point is not “make the game faster”, that would be pretty shitty. My point is the things that are being done aren’t always the things that should be being done. Also some of the points here are out of nowhere- nobody mentioned microtransactions. Not once.
(Though I think the reward items are a little meh due to their exclusivity I don’t think they cross the line of fairness or should be called “microtransactions”)
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Yes. We want to tackle the NPCs first, as we can use their shapes for the default models.
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This.
The OP did.
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Uhh…no I didn’t. Nothing I circled had to do with microtransactions
Yes, absolutely. Joshua stopped to work on upgrades for a while, but he is back on character models right now. He is currently working on the new character model for the Oasis store NPC. I wanted him to get through the plaza NPCs first, and we will get to the default human player models afterward. This decision was made because the vast majority of players use workshop player models anyway.
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This is the only thing I can imagine you’d be referring to, which doesn’t mention microtransacrtions at all.
(Also I do disagree with this specific point, backer rewards is part of the only way to sell a game through crowdfunding)
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Read my comment on the picture. I was referring to the back and donor items not being “available to all players”.