On the contrary, people voting and posting suggestions and bugs influences our choices greatly.
This has been stated quite a few times, but we don’t always work on the same projects at the same time. Our artists will often work on maps on the side while they await our programmers. Our programmers are pretty busy right now. Zak is busy working on Global Chat, Workshop, and Arcade which are all very large projects in of themselves. Deniz is working on migrating our engine to the latest version, which is also a massive task (and we definitely need to upgrade our engine version). Foohy is busy with school at the moment. I have been focusing on Halloween and I took a week off and just came back today. Halloween was a large update that included lots of great tests of our plans for the Plaza (such as the minigames and character events).
However, we have been prioritizing Zombie Massacre for quite some time now, if you’ll look at the previous logs the artists are going at it (Search results for 'zombie massacre category:62 order:latest' - PixelTail Games - Creators of Tower Unite!).
Bug fixes need to be solved quickly, though, as they effect players right at this moment.
There’s some pretty bad bugs still in Virus and Little Crusaders which effect the player counts there. Planet Panic is going to be remade.
Game Worlds take a long amount of time to make. They’re large separate games that have completely new mechanics that have to be made, tested, and iterated on. We also need maps, music, and weapon models.
But, again, we’re working on it. I will be finishing up some more Zombie Massacre gameplay soon.
I have been working on Halloween. I took a week off and then came back to solve bugs on Saturday.
Media player is a very popular and heavily used feature in our game and the bugs that its been having has been there for 8+ months. It’s quite embarrassing and I wanted to solve a few of them after I got back from my break. It is a feature we advertise and I expect it to be in a better state than it is. The fact that turning off and on the media player completely breaks its use is pretty awful and something that I feel should be resolved sooner than later (like I said it’s been several months).
We gauge how popular things are by our suggestions and Trello votes and from community feedback on the forums and the servers. There are many sections to the game that need to be attended to and that’s why I’ll often hop around fixing bugs that have been reported.
I believe I personally talked to you about Fishing, if not, my mistake.
Fishing was delayed due to the Steam Inventory changes that Valve required us to make. We had to put everything on hold for a couple weeks to solve this inventory issue before Fishing could continue because Fishing heavily uses the inventory for its functionality.
After that delay, Halloween came up. It’s a serious of events that just unfortunately delayed it. I am currently (and most likely for the future) the only programmer working on Fishing. Foohy helped me out with the inventory side of things, but the gameplay is all me. So I’ve been doing prototypes here and there, and solving the issues. I’ve actually been asking our artists to finish up some more of the Fishing items, so it’s not really that far off from being completed. Krionikal also needs to finish up the weapon animations as well (which he got some solid progress on).
Things like this happen in game development and we try to avoid it.
I would like to explain the Roller Coaster. The Roller Coaster was an Indiegogo promised feature (literally the first thing we promised to add) and we don’t want to break any promises. We knew the Roller Coaster was not going to bring in a lot of players when making it (which is why it was so low priority). I do plan on adding a minigame aspect to it one day.
However, going back to what I was explaining earlier, the Roller Coaster was completed several months before it was actually released. We just sat on it for awhile because there was a major bug with the seat system that greatly effected the Roller Coaster (basically you couldn’t sit in the seats at all so there was no point in releasing it), but everything else with the Roller Coaster was done. Since it was lower priority than everything else, it was just stuck like that while the seat system was upgraded and improved. After several debugging builds (each take 4-5 hours), Foohy figured out the problem and then Roller Coaster was quickly finished off.
We have been heavily focused on gameplay additions. The whole Plaza minigame system was a massive task and now it’s done and we can add minigames to the Plaza. My plan is to add quite a few Plaza minigames.
Remodeling stuff that’s already in-game is the purpose of our Early Access project. We’re not finished with a lot of the models and they’re gonna need to be remodeled or redesigned at some point. Optimization requires us to retouch existing assets all the time.
I’d say if we got a lot of things in first without having some sort of quality bar, it would deter our players from playing the game. I personally don’t want to rush games out and then have to go back and adjust so much. It would be better to have good first impressions. A great example of ruining first impressions is Planet Panic. That game was rushed out the door and it’s totally noticable. Planet Panic is very much a prototype and no where near up to the standards of the other games. When I come back to Planet Panic, I’m going to be starting from scratch basically. So, yeah, rushing is often bad.
Arcade has seen development. We don’t check off things on Trello unless they are completely finished. Arcade models are finished (which was recent) and the API is nearly complete. I have finished the non-arcade API gameplay base code as well for games like the basketball. Arcade is definitely a huge project, though. We don’t want to release half the arcade, we want to release the entire thing because first impressions are huge to us and releasing something half done will just lessen the impact of the feature.
I don’t want to sound too proud of our project, but TU is unlike many other Early Access games. We’re not making a single genre of gameplay, or a single world/universe. TU is a combination of lots of different games with different game mechanics, different moving parts, and multiplayer networking.
There’s so many aspects of the game and so many directions it can go.
There’s people who love building Condo stuff and want more Condo tools and furniture, people who love games and want more Game Worlds, people who love the Plaza and want more Plaza activities/games, people who love collecting things and want achievements, people who love socializing and expressing themselves and want clothing/emotes, people who love sharing media and canvas images who want more of that, and there’s even people who want to make their own items through Workshop. We’re trying to get through all of what people want and we work as much as we can on TU.
To sum it up: I understand and we’re definitely prioritizing new games.