Whats next now that steam has been released.

[burningpet]

Hey old and new townies, i am Ben, part of the duo behind Towns. nice to meet ya all newcomers!

I was away at a long vacation that was planned long time ago during the release, so there was a severe lack of communication from us.

Well, lets fix that, shall we?

So, the first thing we are doing is implementing a method that will allow new patches to be save game compatibles. this may sound small and trivial, yet it proved tricky and essential to our progress.

After we solve this nagging issue, we will start fixing and improving critical stuff that floated by the release.

We will enable interacting with water, such as blocking and controlling it, implement real terraforming, have heroes trade loot and form parties, have them also pay rent but also make soldiers have a salary, so the economy is going to be a bit more complex. We plan to improve the hauling issues and have a way to control where your townies can or cant go to. implement the long by now promised fear feature that will determine whether a townie fight or flight.

We will improve how happiness is calculated. animate all living things in the world, as well the workshops. have the option to rotate items and the camera and implement a zoom function, even if just for taking screenshots.

We also have a new feature planned that will allow player to exprience other player built towns in an interesting way:
A player can choose to "bury" his town, or, it will be buried automatically if all of his citizens die. that buried town will drop a below surface and when a new player starts a game, that town will be a part of the newly generated dungeon.
Imagine a map with few towns buried one on top of each other, this will surely make the dungeons much more interesting to explore.

There are many thing we need to improve and there are even more many things we want to add, so Towns is definitely not dead and you can all expect great things in the near future.

[Newskin01]

Thank you for the update, really excited about this town underground dungeon thing. Sound rather difficult to implement, but awesome indeed.

EDIT: Also you may want to post this in the Steam forums as I feel this would help make a lot of people stop asking if you guys are still alive and such nonsense.

[caprontos]

Thanks for the update, nice to see the burying towns idea is not dead.. as it sounded pretty interesting the first time I heard it... It'll be something like an archeological dig over a city that's been in the same spot for .. a very long time.

[Empalaor]

The buried cities is a great idea.

But this means that finally will be increased the under and top levels over 12??

[Jabberwocky]

Like .bones files in Nethack? Awesome!

[caprontos]

The buried cities is a great idea.

But this means that finally will be increased the under and top levels over 12??

You already can .. you can have a total of 64 layers in map generation.

The reason they stopped at 12 up is because... They didn't want to make the default game lag anymore then it has to.. with a massive world height.. As for dungeons I think it is because 12 dungeons seemed enough?:P (though I am unsure how much world height matters if it is mostly air.. I didn't notice any when I did it at lest..).

I have a sky/ocean island map though that has something like 54 layers.. Make a post in the modding section if you want some help with out to make a map with much higher map heights.. or lower

[rumboon]

Thank you Ben for posting. I hope you had a nice vacation. Although you whent on vacation, there was another one at home taking care of things. Thats no reason not to communicate with your fan base. You seriously damaged your own companies reputation, especially on STEAM. Im sad to say, that didnt do any good. No words here will ever bring that to a good end, really. People simply dont trust your company nor either of its devs. Words are words and deeds are what count. We have yet to see any of these things you promised. You send a game for 10 euros (which is a large amount for any unfinished game). I sure hope you fix the things you promised. Please dont get me wrong. I like the game, but after all the things that have happened the last weeks, im pessimistic. I have had more games that devs promised the heavens, etc. None came through. So, I sure hope you do. Ill give you the benefit of the doubt, but I believe alot of people didnt buy the game thanks to the bad launch. I for one am not recommending the game untill things are fixed.

Another point is, the things you promise are nice, but whats the timeline? Like years as was stated by a dev on the STEAM forum?

Thanks for reading. I do understand its not all positive I wrote, but its well meant and I hope the company learns from this.

[MadJack]

Thank you Ben for posting. I hope you had a nice vacation. Although you whent on vacation, there was another one at home taking care of things. Thats no reason not to communicate with your fan base. You seriously damaged your own companies reputation, especially on STEAM. Im sad to say, that didnt do any good. No words here will ever bring that to a good end, really. People simply dont trust your company nor either of its devs. Words are words and deeds are what count. We have yet to see any of these things you promised. You send a game for 10 euros (which is a large amount for any unfinished game). I sure hope you fix the things you promised. Please dont get me wrong. I like the game, but after all the things that have happened the last weeks, im pessimistic. I have had more games that devs promised the heavens, etc. None came through. So, I sure hope you do. Ill give you the benefit of the doubt, but I believe alot of people didnt buy the game thanks to the bad launch. I for one am not recommending the game untill things are fixed.

Another point is, the things you promise are nice, but whats the timeline? Like years as was stated by a dev on the STEAM forum?

Thanks for reading. I do understand its not all positive I wrote, but its well meant and I hope the company learns from this.

I'm sorry but it's obvious you have no clue what you're talking about and have no coding experience.

Towns is in late ALPHA or early beta. But, that doesn't matter. What matters is the game is not released yet. There are tons of stuff to add, to fix, to test and to balance. The "launch" was fine for what it was, a late alpha version of a game.

What people like you don't understand is a release at this time of development will always be far from being perfect, it simply never will. There are always bugs, problems and other factors that many people will never understand because they're too interested in playing the game even though it's not ready for that simple purpose. At this stage the people that buys should only be those that can cope with the constant bugs, problems, gross imbalance, crashes and other issues. On those issues Towns has had a very good launch in my opinion as the game is pretty stable.

What I suggest people like you do is shelve Towns for about 6 months and wait for it to be a lot more polished.

The only thing I wish devs would have done differently is properly inform the community they were going "away" for a bit as weeks without news made me think the worse. A timeline would be nice as would also be a list of intended features, but those I don't really care about. Nice but far from mandatory.

Lastly, about the haters: Let them hate. Nothing can be done and no matter how hard anyone tries there is no way you can please everyone and, truth be told, nobody should go out of their way to try to either. Let them stew and wait until Towns gets more mature.

[Puppykisser77]

Thanks for the update, Burningpet, it's nice to hear what you're all working on. I'm especially excited about being able to do something about the occasional leak, as I was lucky enough to have a game where my water is somewhat bugged- I dug underneath a river without realizing it, but the water hasn't flooded my dungeon yet. I figured that when an update came, all of my hard work would be lost, but with the addition of terraforming, I'm hoping I'll be able to control the flood when the bug is fixed and the flood finally comes.

[Bumpinthenight]

Thanks for the update Burningpet, I am looking forward to the evolution of this game. Towns as a concept scratches so many gaming itches I've had for years