The Actual Letter to the Developers

[macdguy]

After re-reading this, most of my things I’ve said from: A Letter to the Developers - #24 by macdguy are about the same.

@PoliteWhale

When the project started, both the community and you, the developers, had high hopes and dreams for this new game. Promises of amazing new features, a full boardwalk with a variety of rides, and customization system beyond belief that left most of us in awe and really excited for this project. But that was the past. Looking at the Trello and at the progress made, we feel like a lot of the original vision that was promised became lost overtime. Yes, the game has been out for only about three days, but we, right now, are looking into the future of the game as well.

@macdguy

Early Access is the best way to get your word out on what is the most important aspect here. I could literally go through each feature and tell you why it wasn’t put in the Early Access release one by one, but I can tell you it’s not because we didn’t want them in the Early Access. Time was a huge factor.

We aren’t done with the game. Seriously, we aren’t. We aren’t done. I don’t know how many times to say it. It will get there. Just hang in there.

@PoliteWhale

As the game stands right now, a lot of the features we do have and the features we don’t have seem very scattered in terms of priority and we are worried that the main focus and sight of the game is being lost.

Give us a bit here, we just release our first game on Steam. Things are a bit crazy right now. Priority #1 is fixing bugs, after that features that people want and we want to see in the game as well. Use the Trello to vote on things, we’ll have more public polls but give us a week to sort out the launch issues because we’re really a small team of people here and we all are doing everything we can.

@PoliteWhale

It seems unusual that we have a set of less valuable features like a Confetti Gun working

That was done in like 2 hours and it was needed to be done to ensure items that use weapons are working properly so we can have items that use weapons correctly. It’s basically the easiest weapon item we could think of.

@PoliteWhale

other features such as lobby-condo communication were left completely absent despite some of them being previously tested

This is not an easy task to complete. It’s going to take a bit of time to make it work for everyone reliably. It’s on the trello now so you can get an idea of where we are with this. https://trello.com/c/bXW6wwQO/136-condo-p2p-connections

@PoliteWhale

There’s a missing sense of priority right now, especially on delivering what the community thinks is necessary. In fact, right now, there’s a lack of communication between the development team and the core community that has both backed your game on Indiegogo, as well as currently helps keeping it alive. Right now, we’re just being told to wait and expect fixes while we would appreciate it if the developers would talk with the community to pin-point what the most important things to fix are at the time, as well as to start worrying about what’s next.

Release week is tough and we’re gonna be back to communicating again soon. We’ve been pretty open on Discord and with announcements and talking directly to people. We’ve been swamped with all the new posts. We read everything, we talk about everything, @Caboose700 replies as much as he can and he talks directly with us before doing so.

@PoliteWhale

We also believe that you, the developers, are working too hard on Tower Unite.

This is our job. This is our profession. If we can’t handle the stress or fire then we shouldn’t be doing this job. We love this job and we love staying up late working on it. We’re almost clear of the major major release bugs, and then we can chill. The game can’t be added to it if it keeps crashing. People are paying for a product and they should expect it to work.

@PoliteWhale

The community doesn’t want to be a burden.

You aren’t. We love you all. We love feedback. We want this game to be the best.

@PoliteWhale

perhaps revisiting developer streams once again

So, I posted about this in the other one. We’re still doing developer streams. I don’t know why people are saying we aren’t.

As for the polls, right now trello gives us a great idea of what people want. We’ll do more polls but we like the trello cards because they’re linked to in-game boards.

@PoliteWhale

We want you to hear our ideas; we also want to be open to your ideas as well, both sides have amazing ideas,

We are hearing your ideas? We can’t implement every idea instantly and we cannot always reply but we’re listening. There’s a TON of new people coming in right now and it’s a little overwhelming. But trust me, we’re listening.

I’m a bit saddened that you are thinking we aren’t listening to ideas or being open after only 3 days of launch. There’s months of evidence of us listening and taking feedback from the alpha stage and even further back (5 years) when we did the same thing with GMTower. We haven’t changed. We’re just REALLY busy right now in this current week with bug fixes.

As you can tell, the latest update has lessened that, but we’re still a little busy. I haven’t really had a break in awhile, but this is what I love doing.

Again:

@macdguy

The trello, in its current form, is all estimated stuff. I wanted to go through it more with the team after launch, but we’ve been REALLY busy with bugs. We haven’t even had the time to get the Game Worlds on the Trello. We have deadlines in mind internally. Game development is a tricky thing to estimate for. You could say laser tag would take you a week, but it could take 3 weeks to fix one bug with laser tag before it’s done.

In short, the Trello should be taken as estimates (as each list stated that) and it’s going to be tweaked to meet the demands of the community. Use the voting system for it! It’s the best way to move something forward or back!