November 2024 Dev Update

:railway_track: 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.

:clipboard: Feedback Survey

feedback survey

First of all, I want to say :hearts: THANK YOU :hearts: 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.

:beetle: 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!

:building_construction: 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.

:wrench: Other Road to 1.0 Progress

:couch_and_lamp: 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.

:people_holding_hands: 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.

:computer: 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).

:boom: 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.

:money_with_wings: 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. :slight_smile:

-wheezwer

<3 PixelTail Games

27 Likes

I am glad to see some incentives for people to become patrons.
Personally, to encourage longevity I still think a sort of system to track how long someone has been a subscriber could help keep subscribers around each month.

One I thought of that would kind of work, is like a sort of milestone system, but it was flawed in the sense that if new items came out, people would have to stay subbed to get them. And it’d create a long wait of reaching those items, that would turn players away.

So my other idea was to have it be where every month you stay a patron; you get a sort of unique currency, like a ‘Patron Ticket’ that you can consume to claim one of the exclusive items in the existing pool (kind of like what is planned for Cosmic Catsack). Regardless how many patron items get added, players could then claim what they actually wanted that month, or if they collected the tickets, could claim as many as they had tickets.

Idk, just food for thought. :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

9 Likes

ohhh!! i’d love to see full survey results with pie charts whenever it’s ready, results are always so interesting :slight_smile:

josanna absolutely outdid herself with all of designs on plaza map, i like the new outside area behind casino- it looks so DAMN good! it always bugged me with how empty it used to be- i look forward to it!! <3

i wish you the best of luck on plaza optimizations! optimizations are always so nice to have!!

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These spots look wonderful!! Johanna has been kicking ass with prettying up the lobby, I’m a big fan of the new waterfall area. Definitely a much needed bit of flair for an underutilized part of the island.

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I do think reducing tri counts would be great, when the plaza is normal or in a holiday version, I’ve felt the load times is getting longer with each update, so reducing the tris is a good start.

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im guessing items under website work is going to be post 1.0? Asking cause its not under post 1.0 on trello but it would make sense cause its not as important as fixing bugs

I appreciate all the hard work you guys put in.

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So glad to hear, that you are Finacially in a bit better situation :hearts:
Thank you for all your work

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I’m a bit late to the Road to 1.0 news, but thought I’d stop by and share good vibes nonetheless. As a long time supporter — a donator since GMT Lobby 1 — I really appreciate all the hard work you’ve put into Tower Unite throughout the years. Sure, it’s been quite some time since Early Access launched. But for me, that makes your persistence all the more evident.

This has probably already been pointed out, but you could’ve just followed the steps from other Early Access projects and dropped the ball as soon as the crowdfunding money was gone. Instead, you kept going for surprising new features and found ways to ask for extra support from those willing to lend it. Another way out was to just release the game as it was and call it a day, which you haven’t. So, no matter how long this took, I personally believe your choices were the most respectful when it comes to everything this project means for everyone it has touched since it was created.

Keep up the good work and best of luck to you with the final adjustments and launch! Can’t wait to jump in on the big day and feel proud of having my name on that golden plate. :slightly_smiling_face:

8 Likes

I wasn’t able to reply to the previous update as I was not able to reply in time, but if GMT’s source gets released on 1.0, will it contain git/SVN history?

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