Any update or anything on this topic? They’ve stated that they were planning to do it “after” arcade. With arcade coming soon to a close (congrats btw), its listing the next development plans being dueling and nightclub. I mean ill just be honest, I want it and I cant play with my friends because we want to build stuff and not just do only minigames then be the only one who can create a home. Any update on timeframe, any employees who are gonna say that “yes im planning to work on that myself soon”. It feels abandoned, Especially since the discussions on it are around a year old and have been locked because the staff didn’t like the conversations. On the personal end for this I looked at their roadmap and their topics and they told me that “we are planning to work on this after arcade”, so I bought 6 copies for me and my friends with the expectation that soon enough we would be able to build an amazing virtual home together that we can build together and enjoy, making our own rooms or even houses via the amazingly large maps. I saved up and got resort of course for this purpose, but now to be perfectly honest im not even sure if staff are going to make good on their claims and now im feeling upset about my purchase of this game because looking at the roadmap and the organization, it looks like “maybe at least another 6-12 months and only if the developers feel like it and don’t get other things they want to work on instead”, and again disappointing given the money spent after being told that “we are going to work on this after arcade”.
The roadmap is tentative and subject to change, but we have been planning to tackle this after the Arcade. I can tell you that we’ve been making progress on it behind the scenes, it is not abandoned. Community Condos is a massive change and requires a lot of tech behind it to happen.
Our developers don’t just choose what to work on. Together as a team, we plan our updates and the next updates after and we have roadmap that we maintain.
If the topic goes off topic, then it’s best to close conversations, it’s not that we don’t like the conversations - we encourage conversation, but off topic/trolling isn’t constructive.
I too have been anxiously waiting for this. Like, I am hugely excited for the arcade, and will most definitely get “re-hooked” like I did with Casino, but damn I just want to build condos with friends… I’m not a very creative person, so I would hugely benefit from working cooperatively with friends.
Honestly, this is a rare thing to do anyway. The only people I have heard that do this are Valve. They just decide what to work on and go there. I don’t know why he assumed pixeltail games do the same thing, it’s really rare. But, I get where he’s coming from, I am hyped for CC and it does feel like it has been in development for ages and I have noticed that from the outside, it looks like it is abandoned but on the other hand, the only people that can say for sure that a project is abandoned are the people who are making the game. I know that you guys have other priorities and that it is simply in the queue of updates. I haven’t seen arcade in person, yet. I am planning on having my first impressions when it’s fully out. But, from what I have heard of it, it sound brilliant
Honestly, this must be a very, very challenging thing to do, making a game, and you guys are doing an absolutely amazing job. Keep it up!
Honestly, I think it just comes down to us announcing it way too early. But we announced it because we wanted to get it out there and let people know why we aren’t working on dedicated Plazas anymore. We also announced it earlier because we thought we could handle it at the time, but ended up missing that due to the complexities of everything else in the game needed to be worked on first. I mean, we had to make everything from scratch for this project - and new technology that we didn’t expect when we first laid out the plans for this game back during that announcement.
Behind the scenes work has been ongoing for community condos. The achievement update was us reworking the entire backend - that backend is needed for community condos. We’ve also done behind the scenes changes to the condo data for community condos, but we don’t really talk about it publicly.
We’ve had different developers tackle community condos, then it got passed to other developers, then got redesigned after we realized flaws in the design of it. We had community condos planned out and then Valve made a major change to the Steam inventory, which required us to rethink it. We’ve had major updates take priority over because they’re more important at the time. All these factors lead to a slow down.
Steam is a major factor for its complexity. If we weren’t tied to that inventory service, we most likely would have had at least a basic version working by now. It’s honestly more work than it seems due to Steam inventory. And trust us, we’ve had many conversations about if we should even keep with Steam inventory. But removing Steam inventory at this point in the game would be a ton of work with little pay off.
For community condos to be released, we need our backend to be solid (achievement update, and various updates after) to process all the inventory changes, we need to make a system for handling authenticating items across condos, we need to go through all the condo items and fix up network and permissions on editing items, and we need to have a solid dedicated server experience for everyone (which is what the recent Unreal 4.20 engine upgrade update was).
So, while it may seem that community condos hasn’t progressed because we haven’t checked off stuff on the Trello, each update we’re doing is absolutely needed for it to even be a thing.
Then there’s the technical strain we have at the moment. We have 4 (1 part time) programmers. We have have to prioritize what tasks we do every quarter. If Rob is busy with the engine upgrade (which the upgrade was a HUGE pain in the ass), he can’t work on community condos. If I’m busy with Arcade (which I am), I can’t work on community condos. If Caboose is busy with Arcade, then he can’t work on community condos either.
Ultimately, work has been done on the backend for community condos, updates that may seem unimportant to community condos (but totally are) have come out.
It’s super interesting to hear the struggles and hurdles you guys have to go through to get to your end goal and it appears that once an update is finished and released, there’s often a strong chance that something will get broken by a newer update and you’d have to come back to it in the future, which does sound like a huge pain in the ass. But, as I said before, you guys are doing brilliantly.
I feel like I am not the only one who wants you guys to prioritize making everything solid before even attempting to start a huge project as a fully working update later is way more useful and fun than a half-broken mess of an update sooner.
But yeah, there’s a reason why Tower Unite is my all-time favorite game and you guys aren’t even nearly finished with it yet. I often feel like we need to appreciate the amount of work you guys have to do. You have to constantly come up with and develop new updates while ensuring you don’t break the others. Not only that but the game is always being updated to the public, so everyone can see the game-breaking issues and you guys have to make sure you hop onto fixing those issues as fast as you can. My brain melts just thinking of how much pressure and work that gives you. Not to mention the fact that the game isn’t being developed by an army of a million developers or anything. It’s not exactly the biggest team in the world developing the game,