I was a member of GMT since around August of 2015 and cant believe that now its July 2016. I remember before I donated to GMT it gave me a warning saying “Gmod Tower will shutdown in April of 2016” and I always thought that “Pssh, that’s so far away I don’t need to worry about it”. Later on I introduced a friend of mine to GMT and he loved it, and because of that, we started playing almost every day. By this time we completely forgot about GMT shutting down until April… when I remembered “Wait, didn’t they say it will shut down this month?” We saw the signs saying it will shutdown soon and we freaked out, playing every game mode 10 times each day. The last day of GMT came and he was online until he had to get off, and I stayed on until 12:00 AM as I had to leave. I spent my time in the nightclub and recorded my condo and all of the GMT plaza. I said my goodbyes and left. Goodbye, GMT.
Release of TU/early experience
(This is mostly why I believe it should have been released later as a more “full game”.)
[You can see my video of my early access experience here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJOmjk_voW8 ]
April 8th, 2016.
Me and my friend go to the TU countdown timer with 15 minutes left, watching as the game was about to be released. Minutes passed until it was 10 seconds. Once the timer reached 0, we raced to steam to search up towers unite and spend our $15 on this game, buying it within the first literal minute of release. We attempted to launch it instantly, only to realize that we couldn’t launch the game due to a missing executable. We waited as we went to the forums, watching it blow up with people talking about it. Later, a patch comes and we start to play it.
Go here for tl;dr or if you don’t care about the story
I start up the game and try to join a plaza server with my friend. We then get errors saying “Lost connection” and we start to get frustrated. At one point we get to a working server and try to play a minigame, as they promised that they all would be there (at least, thats what we thought), only to find they don’t work either. Nothing worked, and the first day was a disappointment.
To sum it up, this is why I personally believe should have been released later.
We were expecting everything to be there. Once the GMT transfer occurred, I was so excited only to realize that they didn’t give you your actual items, and instead the money. It was okay, until I realized that things in TU had a inflation in price. So, I didn’t get everything back and now I have a text document named “Shopping list” so I know what to buy so I can get back my stuff. Some things were left unfinished like the casino and other things that were just generally in GMT. It needed a lot of work and it still does with the glitches, unfinished areas, and physics.
this was kind of all over the place, mostly because I usually never make forum posts anywhere and im bad at writing reviews and such… Shout your opinions.
This was fixed in less than 5 minutes and it was an issue with Steam’s deployment and Zak worked with Valve to fix it very quickly.
You should never expect that with an Early Access game. The reason we went with the Early Access model is because we knew the game would take a very long time to create and we wanted feedback and support from our community while we develop it. We couldn’t have found or fixed a lot of the issues with our game without our community playing and testing the game.
GMTower originally launched with 2 gamemodes and no theater, no trading, very basic inventory and suites, and like 2 stores. It took 4 years to get GMT to the point that Tower Unite already is at and Tower Unite has only been around for a year now. Not to mention that Tower Unite had to be built from the ground up and GMT was a mod of an existing thing.
Casino came out 3 years after GMT was released. We’re getting Casino out by August for Tower Unite in just 3 months after release. The Casino is a very complex piece of the game. It’ll be worth the wait.
So did GMT. GMT had tons of issues that we just couldn’t fix. Now with Tower Unite we can. We’re a small team. We have one full time lead programmer, 2 full time gameplay programmers, and 7 artists (a mix of full and part time). Right now our programmers are a little overwhelmed with the Casino, which I’m going to be writing up a big blog post about slots soon.
Have you played the game recently? A lot of the first day or first week issues have been resolved for months now.
There’s a big reason why the casino is taking so long: the backend stuff that makes sure the casino payouts are absolutely fair and balanced has to be basically programmed from scratch. Once the backend stuff is finished, casino features should be added in the plaza relatively quickly. Same thing for boardwalk games! They require a gamemode backend as well. After it’s completely finished, there should be more boardwalk games ready and working in the plaza.
I will admit I feel that Tower Unite should have waited a couple more months until launching until early access, but I don’t think it should have launched as late as you think it should have.
A lot of first-day early access experiences can be pretty bad, but they usually get fixed over a period of time. That’s what happened in Tower Unite! A bunch of small features and bugfixes have been added since Early Access release. As Mac said, have you even played the game after the first day?
Also, when you buy an Early Access game, you’re taking the risks of having an unfinished game in your library that you paid for. Try not to complain too much when the feature you expected isn’t in the game yet.
We’ve been doing exactly what we needed to do, and it’s going better than we could have ever hoped.
One significant thing that a lot of people seem to lose sight of when talking about Tower (or indie games in general, really) is that we’re a team of six people (minus a few part-timers), fresh out of college, building an MMO from the ground up. We work 10+ hour days, sometimes without taking weekends off.
Going with the Early Access program and letting people buy it unfinished is the only reason we’ve come as far as we have. Had we been working other full-time jobs in order to survive and been working to complete Tower in our off time, it would NEVER have been finished. We would have found other jobs and would never have had this unique opportunity to form a tight-knit team of people who have been friends forever, and operate under our own rules.
It’s going really well, and is only going to get better.
I think it comes from an issue where people don’t quite understand the amount of work that goes into a game, which is understandable considering there are games being churned out by big AAA companies with 100’s of developers. The amount of work being done is really freaking impressive and I really appreciate all the work they do for something that probably gets them very little money, they could of chosen to use the skills they had and join a massive company and make possibly tons of money but they decided to go and work on something they were passionate about so they deserve an alternative to money, love from the community and here it is from me, everything from the awesome music made by you to the programming I really do appreciate it!
