Hello everyone, and welcome to the Weekly Dev Log for November 25th, 2019, detailing all the changes that have happened since November 18th, 2019. Note: Devs that don’t appear in the weekly log are not necessarily away or not doing work, but may be working on things currently not announced or backend work that doesn’t need to be detailed.
Hot Fix 0.8.5.1
We’re almost finished working on a hot-fix, including optimisations to Condo lighting and bug fixes. Check out the progress on our Trello page.
(Also, If you don’t want massive downloads every time we push out updates, read here for a solution!)
Arcade Progress
@macdguy made more progress on various Arcade games. Check out some sneak peeks below:
Despite what people may say about arcade taking too long, I much rather have a fully polished arcade with a bunch of cool new gamemodes popping up constantly rather than something small that will get old quick.
You’re doing great Pixeltail! Keep up the awesome work.
Also, working claw machine that isn’t rigged? Arcade is going to be THE BEST.
All we need are some chiptune tracks from will and we’ll have the perfect thing to rack up those hours in TU <3 Much love to the devs and their hard work!
Absolutely. I was just thinking the other day how inconsistent the bowling power is. I don’t know exactly how its determined, but it is near impossible to get consistent strength on throws at the moment.
I can throw at the exact same acceleration two times in a row, and depending on how the server is feeling, the second throw will be a meteorite strike.
Bowling is due for a touch-up, its just much lower priority than a lot of things. It may not be consistent, but it is fully functional and still fun.
Edit: Also I have to cap my frame rate to get the spin meter to be consistent.
Chiptunes you say?
How bout from the chiptunes community?
I listen to a lot from Chipmusic dot org.
Also Chiptunes = win has a ton of great free albums, they probably wouldn’t mind.
Maybe a video space for a jukebox would do like we have in the bar area and the like.
Personally I’m good if all the machines make their own fanfare sounds and music for that classic atmosphere.
Speaking of the Arcade itself, I kinda wish we could have a mini preview, get a good look into the arcade map and the like.
Casino has seven or so machines so half or even just one or two machines as a preview would be nice.
Better to have it done in one go as it’ll definitely add to the atmosphere.
Worth the wait, gotta be patient.
I’m looking forward to more on the 2D game making support and its networking features. I have some ideas I wanna try.
For me im not upset about arcade being polished, its more that its taking up so much time and process. It may be selfish for my reasoning, but i am the player and this is the reason i dont currently play. My biggest reason for playing tower unite is playing with my friends, so we can build a home together. Community condos was something they were working on then decided to put that update on hold so they can work on arcade. Arcade is great but the core reason i would even come back to tower unite is community condos, so arcade itself will not help me as i am not interested in a single player experience
I understand being more interested in community condos than the arcade, and that’s totally a fair opinion. Personally, I think that both pieces are important for the longevity of Tower and I definitely want both of them to be polished as much as possible before being released, regardless of which order the updates come out in. Ultimately it is Pixeltail’s decision on which feature to focus on first, and the amount of detail and care they’ve put into the arcade makes me very optimistic about the future community condos update.
Plus, this way when the community condo update does come out and you return to the game, you and your friends will all have a ton of new minigames to play in the arcade whenever you’re not building a condo
I totally get what you’re saying, but I believe in PixelTail’s ability to make strategic decisions on prioritizing features.
Arcade definitely seems to pull in most (if not all) resources on the team. They need models, art, animation, coding, etc. It seems efficient to coordinate everyone’s tasks the way they have been. Everyone knew this was going to be a huge undertaking, and the progress has looked great in terms of speed and quality. I’m glad to see all hands on deck.
Its also important to note Arcade is currently a massive hole, void of content in the middle of the plaza. Transforming that empty shell of a building into a buzzing hive of players bursting with new content will be very impactful. If we get the 2D Arcade API, that’s going to be an entirely new category of Player Created content with INSANE potential.
But to YOUR point condos seem to have been getting the short end of the stick lately. We’ve gotten intermittent releases of new condos, some furniture sprinkled in here and there, but there hasn’t been a core feature introduced since I think gizmos. I think PixelTail is aware how vital Community Condos in particular are. Its already mind blowing to see what individuals create, once we’re able to join forces it’ll generate fantastic projects and let users create their own sub-communities.
Priorities are always shifting. Scheduling and coordinating the remaining features that need to be developed looks like a daunting task I would never want to take on. I think condos will get their time in the spotlight sooner rather than later.
In fact, PixelTail is listening to the community. In the July 2019 Survey Arcade was the most anticipated update, almost doubling Community Condos’ votes (which came in 3rd).
TL;DR: DAMN STRAIGHT we need community condos and some condo updates in general, but there is a lot of reasoning to why Arcade is coming first and I get that.
Didn’t mean for this to end up being a wall of text
