I posted this devlog last week but just realized there is a forum here for them!!

https://spekwork.itch.io/tower-fantasy/devlog/115610/tower-fantasy-or-can-we-rel...

Please check it out, and if you're interested I'd love to show you a demo

Also: I am posting a trailer for it next week, any feedback on this draft will help me immensely

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tower fantasy; or can we release a game, an album, and a zine in a month?

tower fantasy is being released on january 20 2020, as a game, album, and lil booklet

i first started working on it in the winter of 2018, which is almost two years ago.

i started it while following youtube tutorials about multiplayer first person shooters and procedurally generated landscapes while visiting cat in chicago. 

i put the game down: i was too busy with freelance contracts, and we had recently started gigco: escape the gig economy, which was foremost in my mind. 

tower fantasy really reminds me of that time in my life, riding the all night bus between chicago and toronto, working on my laptop, the orange michigan highway floodlights pulsing by my window.

opening up old projects  is opening up an old version of yourself. 

coping with code i wrote when i was in my prehistoric period as a programmer is all deciding what's worth fixing and what improvements you sacrifice because untangling the spaghetti code would take too much time.

i'd say im in the late neolithic age of coding now.

and i'm trying to do this fast, it seems like the only way to get noticed on these cursed platforms is to go for quantity.

impale thyself upon the barricades of content

so for the first foray onto itch.io i'm resuscitating an old game that hopefully gets some mileage from the design, by cat, and the procedurally infinite content.

for music in the game, i've used some tracks that were generated by a markov chain in max/msp, a node based coding interface. with the gracious help of ben, i will be releasing those tracks on itch and bandcamp.

finally the game has an element to it that is essayistic and wordy, if i mix that with some images i can release a zine, right?

real question is, if we release a dynamic variety of content, will people pay us for our labour?

we're releasing this in one month but i would love to send you a copy of the game to try !

- jonathan

auto play mode, first trailer, free (ai generated) music

scroll to the bottom for a link to the game!!

The holidays are a time to work on something other than work

- is what Kai Hutchinson (@reginagamedev) said when I talked to him in early January, and it's very tru. I spent two weeks pouring hours into Tower Fantasy, adding new systems, control scheme, UI, writing, programming music, and trying to set up some promo like gifs and a trailer.

features

• Powerups that have expiration timers
• Automatic targeting (you don't have to worry about turning, anymore)
• Improved air control (flying)
• 3D soundtrack of AI generated music

Above mentioned Kai gave me the great idea of the shot being controlled by mouse position, and it feels great, the game is acquiring a more casual feel to it, which is the direction I'd like to move in with it, maybe create an auto play mode?

trailer

Tried to be short and sweet with this video, and the editing was helped by some great feedback I received from a few folks. I recorded the video for the trailer and the gifs in this post using Lanre Olokoba's Natcorder, and I think I'll just leave the gif recorder in there, because the gifs it produces look so nice. 

IMO the gifs look much better than the video I captured for the trailer, because of the slight compression on the capture using Natcorder in unity. Because of the pixellated look, any compression at all will make it look low res and blurry (which I think the trailer does but hey gotta start somewhere). The gifs don't compress at all so you get the chonky pixellated dithering. Unfortunately after effects/premiere do not import gifs (at least not these gifs), so for the next video I'm going to export gifs to a stack of pngs using a website, which I will then open as frame animations in after effects.

markov chain soundtrack

I made a very simple generative music patch in MaxMSP that uses a probability algorithm called a markov chain to compose new music based on midi files that i give it. I send the audio it generates to Ben McCarthy and he does sound science to make it groove. We're going to be putting out an album to go along with Tower Fantasy, but you (yes you) can have these two tracks right now for free!

Here is a picture of my MaxMSP spaghetti :-P

download the beta :-)

give the game a try and i will implement your feedback!

- jonathan

releasing tower fantasy

Tower Fantasy is out today! It's a "tower offense" game, with procedural generated levels, a leaderboard, AI generated soundtrack, and essayistic navel gazing narrative about the evolution of power fantasies in shooter video games.

last minute polishes

Added two new things over the past week that should improve the experience:

• wireframe shader on the terrain
  • all the better to imitate Tower Fantasy's original inspo, The Sentinel
• a global leaderboard
  • made using firebase!
  • get the points!

soundtrack available

You can get the soundtrack here

it is made by a markov chain

it is further improved by Ben McCarthy

hello I just wanted to know if I can make a video on your game?