Weekly Dev Log for September 30th, 2019

Announcements Weekly Dev Logs
21

I’m sorry to you all guys when I react and talk like that and my crappy english skills but please understand that my patience is over with the way they develop the game and the experience. Kickstarter is gambling. You put your amount of money in and you probably get nothing out of but frustration and so was my experience so far and I gave them my hell mails. Yes so far all games failed or is not doing okay including Tower Unite. The launch version had so far I can remember nothing but minigolf, virus, ball race, condo, theatre and shopping. Very lacking and Casino came a few months later, a few months too late then thats when the money had purpose, I’m not interested in building and I expected to have the casino at launch ready. The launch build had no framerate limitation option, so the game could (& will when your GPU was weak at the time) fry & damage your graphic card and I reported this on the Steam forum. And that is the first time I was annoyed. They kinda did work on the overheat issue but sadly no option to help yourself.

I haven’t played much in the first two or three years. Then I finally had someone to play and witnessed some interesting things, such as the global chat yes (I have to mention it again, I still cannot deal with this.) When the new global chat came out people got banned for no reason, no reason publicly given and no public notice. So how did they break the rules when … there are no rules? The new global chat allows you to type from anywhere in the game and no rule window with confirmation popped up. The rules are written down on a texture file and you have to find it in the Plaza map which took 3+ minutes long to load back then on a HDD. This big mistake alone shows why Pixeltail need someone who helps them out with their plans then they don’t finish their plans. One example: This multiplayer poker kicks you out when the round is done, why was it made and released that way? You don’t expect this in a 15 dollar game. Fishing’s difficulty is a joke, very hard is … between easy and medium yea. I don’t even know why they bothered to add the difficulty text on the bottom when the difficulty was indeed difficult at the fishing launch update but then removed. Plane wars is a very bad flying plane shooter game… A free Garry’s Mod mod did better and Minigolf… Ugh yo the maps look beautiful guys it is (Emission is not a good map tho sorry) but the gameplay kills the mood and the beauty of the map. I’m playing it with my friends and my mom and then yep the ball is out of bounce (Treasure Cove), yep the ball is stuck in the pipe (Sweet tooth). I report the pipe thing, nothing. Months later they fixed it. They did not, reported it and had to wait for months Again. They fixed it recently again I’m not sure, I tested it recently in the current build and now my ball bounces away when I go through the first possible HIO pipe OH MY GOD. The Hole 11 in Treasure Cove is since 2,5 years screwed the ball likes to fly out and man 2,5 years that is nuts for a 15 dollar game. It is nuts the game comes with no separate workshop model settings for each game world when… you know they had the idea to not allow custom models in Game worlds. It’s nuts the game don’t alert you with a popup when something isn’t working like the Steam servers or the inventory back queue is very high (takes (many) hours to receive it). It is nuts the developers have to tell in the global chat, which you don’t see it in game world by default or turned off. It is nuts that the music is so elite (to will: Thank you again for joining this team and make elite class top tier music) and the gameplay is screwed. Virus is also not nice to play as infected and I’m having framedrop issues. Steam claims I’m having 60 FPS but it feels more like 55ish and it happens a few time every minute. Zombie Massacre needs more, like more map interaction and I sent an e-mail about that too. The Barrel for example in Compound/Hard map could fall down and spread the flames or something, so all the zombies are under flames and increase the difficulty. I also expect to die when I’m near the exploding gasoline thing but nope. And now the uncool HUD change in Virus.

The GMTower Reunite was a waste of time, plain simple. That was so far the worst idea, it is no use and the lack of players and no singleplayer support makes this more useless. Now you guys want to pay the server bills for that? Like, from now on I decide to gift another copy of Tower Unite the money also goes to This?

I realized last night that, the way they develop their game, goes like Fallout 76 then the stuff also happens in Fallout 76. They rather move on and on But… they come sometimes back to fix (or not) and then you have to wait for a long time again. This annoys me a lot, this false hope and my friends and my mom are swearing “I thought they fixed this” yeaaa embarrassing and frustrating.

I’m hoping way too long and I am now tired of this. Pixeltail have to change after this or halloween’s update, they should have changed a long time ago, or else it’ll probably be a good game months after Early Access when the quality is so years behind. It is shaking between bad and ok and that is not okay at all for an Early Access Steam game. Stuff that is simply bad should be removed and

And I don’t know what to do. I told to Mac quite enough of times and it is simply not happening. The weird ideas are still coming, the quality stays low where it is and All I can do now is to post my frustration in public which I really don’t want to but I can’t take it anymore. I really thought he’ll improve the game (I even thought to haveMac on my friendslist telling the issues he should work on from what I experience and hear in the global chat listening to you guys when I’m online) but it isn’t happening man Another kickstarter game I should put in my “Stop hoping” list… I’m super upset okay I gave 8 copies of this game to my friends! I don’t know what to do and I hate to say mean things to Mac and in general, but my patience is now gone.

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22

I really feel you here, and I always appreciate a good read. I’m not going to try and change your mind on anything, and you have every right to live whatever life makes you happy. The only thing I’ll say, is this is the sad reality of a small game in beta, with a smaller (And unbalanced) dev team.

To play Tower Unite, you have to be able to shrug off the bugs, crashes, server outages, seemingly weird design choices, and anything that bothers you. Nobody should have to do that, but the crowd of people devoted to this game do.

The game is always changing, but slow progress can be frustrating, and if you or your friends/family can’t look past the recurring issues, then it might be time to put the game down for a good while, and check back much later.

Early access sucks, but for an ambitious game like this with so little support other than the initial crowd funding, it’s needed for the game to grow and reach completion. Nobody has to like it, and your disappointment is valid. I hope you can be happy with this game some day.

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23

Uhhhhhhh…

Ok? I mean, if you’re that impatient, I suppose that’s your way of looking at it and I can’t necissarily fault you at that.

But understand, Nat, that game development takes time. The fact that we’ve gotten what we had with the team size and little to no official backing from anyone but themselves is downright impressive to me. Sure yeah, it took a while. It’ll still be a while before everything is complete. Arcade probably won’t even hit until probably late December or early January, but you must understand that Mac and the gang aren’t f*cking miracle workers. They’re human. I don’t really have a fully personal relationship with Mac tbh, but I deeply respect him and the amount of effort he and his team have put into this game. Its not easy.

If you’ve really been talking to Mac you should’ve realized that. 'Nuff said. I’ve been around for 3 Years here, I joined in right after Bowling was launched in Late 2016, and I’ve enjoyed this game immensely and enjoyed watching it grow. Its been a huge inspiration for my career path and I’m very glad to say that.

If you’re really so ill-content to be that impatient and bail on this game, then I won’t stop you. I really can’t stop you anyway. But please don’t think the devs don’t care. They do. They work on things as a group as much and as hard as they need to and if they find they need something else done, they take care of that first and move forward. But as I said, they’re not miracle workers. You won’t find months of effort being done in a couple of weeks unless your developers are Jesus, Steve Jobs, and Bill Gates, and last I checked, none of those schmucks are on Pixeltail’s roster.

Just be patient and give it time man.

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24

I know It is impressive what they have done so far and their motivation is incredible. And this is why I hate to say the mean things to him and them. But 2+ years is so long already I don’t know how longer I shall wait. I told them and I wish they focus more on bug fixes so the game is at least fine to play without frustration. More testing, more time. Not too much time but ya ah I’ll see what happens in the next months and hm. I really want to like this game…

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25

It’s nice to see you’re so kind about it. Don’t feel like you have to play or like the game, being unhappy with how things are is fair, nobody can say you’re wrong about that. Everybody is just working to create a good game, and a good community. Being active in suggesting features or changes is good, and improvements are always happening, though it’s understandably slow.

Even if it takes a long time, I have faith this game can achieve amazing heights, but as long as you have issues with the game, don’t be afraid to acknowledge them. Don’t force yourself to play, just keep tabs once and a while, and check in for updates. Thanks for the civil discourse!

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26

I just wanted to mention that GMod Tower launched with suites and 2 of the gamemodes and it took 7 years for it to get all of the features it has in the reunion.

TU launched with condos, more items, and twice the gameworlds that GMT launched with, and in 3 years it has almost every gamemode that GMT had, every plaza activity (besides arcade and dueling, both of which are coming out pretty soon), way more items and condos than GMT had, achievements/milestones, and a lot of things that were never in GMT like bowling and Planet Panic (though that mode sucks right now).

So, even if TU’s taking a while to get developed, it’s at least going a lot faster than GMT did.

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27

I definitely agree it’s going faster, but keep in mind TU has something to replicate/ work off of instead of starting from scratch in terms of ideas. Still moving relatively fast though!

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@nat Thanks for making a post, I took a bit to respond to as much as I could.

There were rules to global chat when it launched, but it was something we had to make easier to access later on. We based the rules mostly on our Discord rules at the time. Now there are rules in-game directly on the chat box.

We’re in Early Access, the game isn’t finished just yet. The game was built around the way it was in GMT. In GMT, Poker would kick you off each round. A system had to be made to make it endless - it has to be developed. The casino update was already taking quite a lot of time back before it got out, so a few things like Poker couldn’t be entirely fully developed. We don’t have a lot of programmers and each game takes a lot of time in of itself. On top of that, we were still developing the game systems for Plaza, which was a massive and time consuming task.

Poker is getting endless mode now that the system was developed for it (Arcade development really helped with this).

Fishing is still going to be tweaked more, we are just focusing on other things right now such as Arcade. I think the difficulty stuff is hard to figure out because there’s a lot of people who hated how hard it was before and I haven’t heard much else.

I think for a quick minigame, it serves its purpose. I do think there could be more to it, but it’s also in the confines of Plaza and there’s so many other things to work on right now. I would be interested in hearing how it could be better - though I have a few ideas myself. The issue comes down to time here, though, we’ve got a lot of other games that need some work as well. It’s definitely an improvement over the GMT version, though. In GMT the plane wars game would lag the entire server and the controls were server dependent (so if you had ping lag, it was really bad).

Minigolf bugs are really tricky to solve. A lot of it has to do with the fact that the physics engine in Unreal isn’t really the best. If the host has low FPS things get weird and unpredictable. It’s something we’ve put a lot of time into fixing as much as we possibly can. We’re still working out some kinks here and there. Pipes, for example, required a new system that made it not rely on the physics because the pipes were just too unreliable. We had to develop a system that uses splines to solve it and toggle between physics and spline animations. I think it works well now, but there were a few issues when it first got out - issues that we didn’t see ourselves but others did.

I think the price point in Tower is very fair. $15 gets you a lot for all the games Tower offers currently and there’s a lot more on the way. The fact is, we aren’t going to have paid DLC or microtransactions, so this price point is pretty important for us as we continue to add more to the game and spend development time on the game. Arcade itself is a huge addition and it’ll definitely make the price point even more appealing.

I understand the game isn’t done, but that’s why we have the Early Access tag still on.

Unfortunately, we don’t have any way of knowing really. There’s not a lot of options we have when Steam is down. We maybe could show some sort of prompt, but it’ll be unreliable as Valve doesn’t offer an official Steam status API. Steam has been really unreliable recently, which we’ve been more than aware of and it’s something we’ve considered refactoring down the road.

Our new backend now handles item grants a lot quicker, though.

This is being worked on. We have a new map in the works and there’s sub-objectives I want to add to Zombie Massacre. Arcade is priority, though.

I pay the GMT server bills out of my own pocket. It’s not part of Tower Unite income.

We’re very passionate about Tower Unite. It’s our only game we’re working on. We work on it every single day, and we’re always improving each part of it. It’s a massive game, and one that needs more developers on it, but we don’t have AAA budget. We’re an indie studio working as hard as we can. Tower has improved over the years and some features take longer than others, but there’s a lot of good reasons behind that.

For example, Arcade has gone from 10 or so games to around 40 unique games now (Johanna made a great post on that here: Reddit - Dive into anything. We want it to be the best Arcade we can deliver and also live up to the hype. We also are working on improving other parts of the game, but it can take longer as we’re a small team.

Certain things will be worked on in different orders, but that’s part of the development of the game. For example, if we start working on Virus solely right now, it’ll hinder the progress of Arcade. So we gotta be really careful with whatever we work on for Virus because if it’s a big feature, it’ll really hurt Arcade development and only delay that feature. We try to avoid jumping from thing to thing - which will result in certain features taking longer to get resolved than others. We do plan our updates to complement each other as much as possible. I understand the frustration of waiting for development, but we’re working as fast (and as carefully) as we can (without overworking ourselves to death).

Should also mention that with Tower Unite, we had to start from scratch development wise. We had to make every gameplay system ourselves. Things like weapon prediction, player movement, inventory, game logic, game systems, Steam systems, etc. So it’s taken a long time to get to this point development wise, and it’s only going to improve now. We have the base game more or less in a complete state, now we have to finish off the other features and iron out the bugs.

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29

everything slightly blurry because i just woke up and trying to read that was…
the only damage done here is to my simple brain trying to understand what everyone was talking about.
im still confused

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30

@LittleLuke Nat was complaining about how “slow” the development on TU has been, but tbh the Devs are giving it their all, its just that development takes time.

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31

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32

There isn’t much need to reply further (Especially after Mac’s ultimate response), but I thought I’d use this opportunity to say one last thing before it dies forever.

I don’t think this is a black and white issue of “just be patient, it’ll be good eventually”, most of this game’s critics wouldn’t take that as a valid answer, and what Nat was saying was about more than that. They were expressing frustration about the focus being more on features than bugs, features implemented not being good or necessary, bugs continuing to return, their input on the game being ignored, and where priorities are in development.

I will say clearly I do not agree with those sentiments, but they were not just staying “why isn’t it good yet”, they were expressing concern if the game ever would be good, and if one step forward might always mean two steps back. Mac gave some very good answers to those concerns, but in particular when they mentioned being embarrassed showing the game to friends, that struck a chord with me.

I said it before, you have to get used to the roughness of Early Access, and when you invite friends less invested than yourself, it’s sad to see all the issues they have when they’re expecting a more polished product, while you’ve gotten used to the occasional bug. That feeling of disappointment is valid, and continuing to feel that after years in development is an understandable concern.

Like Mac said, I’d like to thank Nat for making the post, and expressing their issues.

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33

Would be nice if there was some sort of pointer showing which direction the player is looking on the map. Everything looking really good so far!

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34

Since the last video taken, there’s now an arrow that points in the direction you are looking and avatars of other players.

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36

Woah, gonna stop you right there - gonna put this out because despite people saying they get that game dev takes time, I really don’t think you quite get it. Making music is a f***ing cakewalk compared to what Mac and Rob and all the programmers that have worked on Tower have to do. It’s the difference between dumping a bunch of paint onto a canvass and calling it good, and painting the goddamn Sistine Chapel. It’s a constant, slow trudging through bug after bug that goes totally unseen because you’re designing something that’s supposed to “just work.” If that’s not something you agree with, then this isn’t the game for you right now.

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37

Can a PixelTail programmer confirm? Or does the mirror side look something like: “It’s just a matter of time really. I could write this in 10 minutes with a brain to sourcecode adapter. But creating sound that matches the gameplay, puts me in a mood, gives me emotion and is just fun to listen to, that’s pure magic to me.”

38

Just gonna say congrats to all the people who have helped keep this thread alive a full week.

And I think artistic and technical design are done in such different ways, that comparing them in that way isn’t possible. They’re both difficult and often time consuming, but the way in which that manifests is very different.

39

iM SORRY?

40

Imagine both of these fields requiring a massive amount of work to produce a quality, finished product.
Wow, what a weird idea lmao amirite guys

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41

Yeah… thanks for keeping this pure cancer alive!