The Road Ahead: July 2017

Hello there everyone! We have lots of new features planned for Tower Unite that we are very eager to share. So we thought we’d take a moment and write them all down and explain each feature in detail to keep you all in the loop.

Since the beginning of Tower Unite’s development, our goal has always been to connect players together. However, this has proved to be quite difficult as there are player-hosted Game World servers, player-hosted Condos, and Lobbies across the world. Today, we’re happy to announce our goals starting with the Living Lobby.

Living Lobby is a new set of features we will be introducing to make the game feel more active, it is comprised of: Global Chat, Shared Plaza Players, and Plaza Events.

Global Chat & Chat Rewrite

We’re completely overhauling our chat system. After many discussions and prototyping, we’ve decided on what we call the Global Chat. With this new Global Chat, you’ll be able to chat with every server (even Game Worlds) in Tower Unite with one centralized chat. You’ll even be able to chat in the menu! P2P chat will be removed and Local chat will be local to locations in Lobby or local to condos.

We will also be adding game events to this Global Chat such as announcing when a Game World has started, Condo parties, player awarded achievements, and current Lobby events. Don’t worry, we’ll have tabs and filters available to adjust how much of the chat you can see.

Along with this, we plan to redo the chat to have better text wrap, chat tabs, customization settings (ex. timestamps), moderation, reporting players, and many other new features.

We hope this new Global Chat will better connect our community together in one place, even if they’re in different servers. We are eager to get this feature out soon.

Shared Plaza Players

For those who haven’t heard, on top of the Global Chat, we’ve been working on unifying the Lobby servers. Shared Plaza Players is a system that will allow people on, for example, the Chicago server to see representations of players walking around (as ghosts) on the New York servers. The goal is to create an environment where the Plaza experience feels like one large server. So far, we have a working prototype of this feature.

Plaza Events

One of the biggest benefits of the Living Lobby system is random Plaza events. This includes: random store sales, short minigames, and events where you can unlock special items you won’t find in stores. Plaza events will help keep the Plaza new and exciting with unpredictable activities.

Payouts Increase

Many of you have pointed out that the Game World payouts aren’t up to snuff anymore. We hear you! To remedy this we’ve decided to increase the payouts on all Game Worlds by an average of 80%. We also increased the payouts on Lobby games by an average of 60% (very noticeable in Trivia, Bowling and Typing Derby). Our goal is to incentivise players to spend less time in the Casino and more time in Game Worlds. Payouts is just one part of that goal. We hope to roll out the payout changes within this week or the next.

Achievements, Milestones, Badges, and Stats

We have been working towards finalizing the back end for the achievements. Achievements, for us, are a big motivator for Game Worlds. As some of you may remember from GMod Tower, we had awards called Milestones, which were themed items that could only be obtained after unlocking difficult or time consuming achievements for each game. We plan to bring milestones back, along with new badges and stats. We discussed this on our previous stream, but work on this feature has progressed steadily.

And lastly…

Our next Game World is… Zombie Massacre!

Zombie Massacre will be our first cooperative game in Tower Unite. Based on the hit gamemode from GMod Tower, Zombie Massacre features arcade-like excitement. We plan to have additional cooperative elements, such as campaigns. We hope to share more information about this new Game World soon.

We hope you’ve all been enjoying our game so far. Thank you all for your support, we’re working hard to bring you these updates as soon as possible.

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Woah.

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yesyesyesyesyesyesyesyesyesyesyesyesyesyesyesyesyesyesyesyesyesyesyesyes

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Epic!

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Awesome!!
Cant wait for all of this, keep it up, guys!

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Awesome! I can’t wait! :relaxed:

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Great update for the future of the game. The chat system and shared plaza players will make the game feel more active than it already is. :thumbsup:

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I really have felt in recent weeks that the chat system needs some working on, so this will definitely satisfy an urge of mine for a while. All of this sounds amazing and I’m pretty excited to see how it turns out!

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I’m excited for all the new stuff coming! Can we get a remake of the obama cutout minigame from GMT but with Trump cutouts? :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

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Wouldn’t this impact fps?

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Glad to see that development for Zombie Massacre is in full swing! I hope to be shooting zombies at a gas station sometime in the near future…

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Plaza Events sounds very interesting :slight_smile:

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Awesome update! Thanks for all the great work guys :slight_smile:

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Excitement overload!


Seriously good things are ahead for TU.

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This is amazing! I hope one of the plaza minigames is hide and seek as me and my friends already enjoy doing this! Keep up the good work!

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Yay, I get to kill zombies under a water tower by myself and win first place again!

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Unify? I think you mean… Unite

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I’m looking forward for all the things you posted, especially plaza events, payout increases, and a new gameworld.

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Finaly the gameworlds aint gonna suffer anymore, yes!!

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All good things to hear.
ZM was one of my favourite parts of GMT, I’m extremely excited to see it up next.

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