The Road To 1.0
We’re on the Road to 1.0! We’re very thankful for the encouraging responses from you all about our goal, and we’ve heard any concerns loud and clear.
We are working hard on this goal, and we’re getting it done with your help. We’ve been really energized organizing and cleaning up the development process and have appreciated all of your feedback.
We always have major bugs in mind, but with no substantial features getting in the way, we’ve been full-speed ahead into working on bug fixes and other game polish!
We would like to get some map updates out to you all as well. You guys have often expressed concerns with our additions to the game without fixing existing bugs, and so we’re trying to be very careful with these map releases at this more critical time, which may lead to delays for those.
If you’ve been following the Dev Updates, you know we also wanted to do a Dev Stream, and it just didn’t work out. Hopefully we can get our thoughts out to you this way, at least, and try to reach out with a stream in the future.
Feedback Survey
First of all, I want to say 
THANK YOU to everyone who has responded to the feedback survey.
You guys rock, and we can’t do it without you, so we appreciate the care you put into your responses.
I said it when we did our Patron survey too, but I have been reading every response as I organize the feedback for our other developers, and I appreciate the effort and organization that was put into your feedback (as well as the funny comments).
The survey has over 700 responses, and I have organized 600+ bug reports for the other developers so far, only getting through Plaza and Condo bugs/crashes at the point I’m writing this.
These aren’t 600 individual bugs, but 600 helpful pieces of information we can use to fix bugs in the Condos and Plaza - and that’s just the start. This all goes along with any existing bug reports and known bugs.
We were happy to see that a lot of issues being reported are known, and we appreciate any details included in the reports.
We’ve already gone through and fixed a chunk of these bugs, and have been getting them crossed off on our list! Keep an eye out for the change logs and be sure to give us feedback if an issue that is labeled as fixed isn’t working.
Please feel free to fill out the survey and fill it out again if you have new issues you want us to address.
NEXT UPDATE: Road to 1.0 Bug Fix #1
Right now we’re working on getting out an update with quite a few substantial bug fixes.
The upcoming update includes fixes to the Plaza, Game Worlds, and Condos.
Plaza fixes include fixes to the fishing ponds, Casino card games, the Arcade, Dark Voyage, and more!
For Game Worlds, Ball Race, Zombie Massacre, SDNL, and Virus all had fixes.
For Condos, several fixes have been made for item collision desyncs, visual issues, and other minor map issues in Highrise, Underwater, and Resort Condos.
Much more is included, and the full list of changes and fixes will be detailed in our changelog when the update comes out, so keep an eye out for that!
FUTURE UPDATE: Plaza Cleanup
While bugs are being fixed throughout the game, we’ve been making great strides with work on the Plaza!
Casino Interior/Exterior Art Pass
@Johanna has been working on a beautiful redesign of the Casino entrance and exterior! These redesigns are intended to make the Casino building design consistent throughout, and add more scenic hang-out spots to the Plaza.
Peninsula Art Pass
The fishing peninsula has been low priority for a long time and has had its visual issues throughout the years, but Johanna has finally been able to give it a fresh coat of paint (and trees!). This change brings the art polish that has been seen around the Plaza to this area that has much needed it.
Great Outdoors Art / Optimizations
Johanna has gone through and spruced up the Vacation houses to give them a more cozy and tropical feel that suits the new style of the Plaza. Again, we really want to make sure there are appealing places that players can hang out in the Plaza, and these have been on the list for a while.
Other General Plaza Work
Johanna is always working hard to optimize the game’s art, and recently she’s been able to do so with the Poseidon Entrance and Rockwork HLODs.
She’s also working on major optimizations to the Plaza’s rendering, by greatly reducing triangle counts and draw-calls all throughout the Plaza. Additionally, the fade-in/fade-out cubemap fake interiors are being replaced with 3D fake interiors for all of the Plaza’s stores, which will not only look better, but be more performant. Finally, she is also creating more fake interiors for all other load-in doors like the Bowling Alley recently received.
Other Road to 1.0 Progress
Basic Condo Items
Along with his great progress on Dino Drive, @Nuclearxpotato has been taking some time to make some basic building pieces for Condos. These include more door and window frames, and a garage door item.
New Player Models
@joshua has been hard at work creating our own player models, working on the designs for the masculine and feminine options.
We hope to add more customization to these in the future, and we’ve heard feedback from those who like the original designs as well.
Major 1.0 Bug Hurdles
In previous player surveys, Bowling has been frequently mentioned as one of the more buggy features in Tower. We’ve been trying to resolve issues with slow physics simulation that occurs in a high population plaza server. Its a difficult situation to reproduce, but we have ideas in mind and may have to be creative in reorganizing how the physics work.
Condos have a ton of tools and features, and so a lot of bugs are bound to show up. One of the tough hurdles we face in the road to 1.0 is tackling these Condo bugs in an organized and efficient manner. Bugs in the Condos are sometimes challenging due to the high customization ability of Condos. Many bugs may be a major issue for a small set of players or for a specific build that prevents a player from using the system as they want, but also may not be an issue others encounter.
A major task we are working on tackling at the moment with Condos are Undo/Redo (frequently mentioned on our feedback survey).
Crash Fixes & Backend & Plaza Optimizations
Crash fixes are in progress, they just take time to reproduce and resolve, but we are getting through the ones we are aware of.
Backend improvements we want to make are all related to increased performance with high server capacity, as well as improving item transactions.
Plaza optimizations are an ongoing project. We’re doing more work with HLODs, which increase performance by replacing chunks of the Plaza map with ones of lower level of detail.
Another task we have to tackle is just general Plaza bugs that cause performance issues, which we are always working on.
Financial Situation & Thank You
We wanted to thank you guys for your help by supporting the Humble Bundle, Patreon, and Makeship campaigns! The Humble Bundle and Makeship campaign have rescued us these past few months, and Patreon is always a help as usual with development expenses. We hope upcoming holiday sales will help the team further, and appreciate any purchases of the game and supporter pack at any time!
Word-of-mouth has brought Tower to life, and we always plan to keep bringing improvements to Tower that we all can be proud of when we share the game with others!
We have made some substantial progress with Patron Rewards (finally!). We’re really happy to finally get out scoreboard backgrounds for everyone, and we are glad to hear that Patrons liked the idea of getting some new unique backgrounds from our Patron survey, so we’re excited to see those come out soon!
A lot of the respondents to our Patreon Interest Survey showed interest in more rewards for subscribing, so we want to be able to do that and stick by our values with developing the game to be as accessible as possible.
We want this game to be the best it can be, and we have to make money to keep the project and our team going, so we appreciate everyone’s help as we do so without adding inconveniences to the game experience!
Tower was made with fun in mind, and we always want to keep it that way. 
-wheezwer
<3 PixelTail Games
