The Tower: The Order of XII
Last Day and support for Ukraine
Today is February 27 and tomorrow 28 is the last The Tower: The Order of XII will be on the Steam store. We really appreciate all the support since we announced the game leaving the store but today I have to ask of you to support the people of Ukraine, they need it more that I do.
War is never the best choice and in fact it shouldn't be a path to take at all. Please, show Ukraine some support and enjoy some of the amazing games Ukrainian teams have to offer.
Thank you again for the journey on Steam.
Leaving Steam Feb. 28 & Final Sale
The last weeks are upon us. Thank you for all the support shown up until now, whatever it is your reason for it.
I will not make any predictions of how we will end up in terms of sales by the time the game will be pulled from Store but at the moment we are sitting at 565, which is beyond I expected to get by the end of February after the initial sales when I confirmed the game leaving Steam.
Last sale starts today and should end February 27. In theory you should be able to buy the game up until the last minute of February 28 10am Pacific Time but the process might be instant or take a while, that I'm not sure about.
If you have wishlisted the game, thank you. If you finally turn that wish into a sale, thank you again. Right now I have other matters in my life that are making work in my current projects a bit difficult, but I hope you join me in Twitter at @Sword_Garden where hopefully you will slowly see how I descend into madness.
Thank you again for the journey on Steam.
Final Discount Sales
We sit right now at 515 copies sold and we again thank you for the support. The first discount coming starts in a few hours at the time of writing this message to you. It will last just for a few days until February 3.
After this our final sale will start February 14 and it will last until the game is pulled from the store forever.
Both sales will have a 10% discount. So if you want to help before the game is gone. Those sales are the best time to get the game.
After the game is gone from Steam. only the Itch.io version will remain, so it you still want to buy it after February 28, that store will be the only way to do so.
A Happy New Year
Well, we reached 470 copies sold as of today. I can't thank you enough people that wish to support, and collectors too. The fact you want to have our game before is gone from the platform of your choice and have a piece of gaming that not many people will have on Steam, is quite the sight to behold.
Please if you wish to buy the game just as a memento, please feel free to do so. We might no get many more sales before the end of February, but my expectations are being greatly surpassed.
I hope you all are having a nice christmas and great beginning of the new year.
Overwhelming Response
John here again. For the last 48 since I made the announcement that the game would be leaving Steam, have been incredible. So many people showing support for the sake of doing so. To all of you thank you very much from the bottom of my heart. At the time of writing we have gone from 82 copies sold in 2 years since the game was launched to 315, simply amazing.
But what does this mean. Well for the game not much sadly. My plans for its future are still long term and to change them to be more "short term", those sales would have to go well into the thousands. This is of course, far too much to ask of any of you. The game will be retired from Steam February 28 at 10am Pacific Time as I'm told, so getting at least 2k sales before that would be a miracle that I'm really not expecting nor hoping.
But I of course was also not expecting to get to 315 sales in 48h. That extra money means I'll be able to cover a bit more electric bills thanks to you amazing people.
The sales have somewhat stabilized and each couple hours 1 to 4 new sales are made so I'm expecting to, maybe, get to 400 - 450 by the end of February if the current flow continues. So, again, thank you very much for the support.
I'll be keeping an eye on the situation but, is the end of the year so rest is my priority and maybe some writing on the side.
So happy christmas, happy new year and thank you for giving me some happiness after these horrible 2 years of pandemic. Please take care and enjoy your time with family.
Goodbye
John here from Sword Garden Studios. In these years of pandemic, many things have happened. I'm working on a new simple game again that will hopefully will release in 2022 but here is the catch. I won't be releasing my own game.
Sadly visibility was and still is a huge problem in the platform and all the sales we made on Steam are still pending as a pay out. We know is not much but that money can pay a couple electric bills and is useful.
This is why we have decided to retire the game from Steam and close our developer account so that pay out can be done without more delay. This process will complete by February 28 - 2022 and so, we have decided over the next 2 months to offer in several sales a 10% off on the game for those who want to help out and keep the game as a memento.
Our intention is to remake the game at some point, make it more simple, improve many aspects and introduce many new ones. Many will ask, why not as an update?
To answer this we have to talk about how the game was made. When our first game was made, and despite my knowledge with programming, I decided to hire a programmer to create most of the game's systems. Sadly and while most of the game works without issues, the game can be played and completed from beginning to end, certain audio levels and some weird quirks with some tiles in the challenge levels not showing up are issue we never got to solve and with reason. We can't.
At $25/h having the programmer solve those issues became too expensive and while his code is great, my own knowledge is very limited in comparison and never could do it by myself.
We even tried to work on a Switch port and have it as an update with everything finally fixed, but after working 6 months with the Dev Kit, I could never got it to work. The best thing we got was the language selection screen. But because the game was programmed with only PC in mind. The code just didn't work on Switch no matter what we or, more specifically, I did.
The game will still be up on other platforms like Itch.io if you prefer it. It includes a version for Linux we could not test because we don't have a system with that OS and a virtual machine is not really the best way to test a game. But we have got any complains about the Linux version not working so we think it plays just fine.
So, what exactly are our plans? I'm personally working on my next game and I will find a indie publisher that will release the game in as many platforms at possible, follow me on Twitter if you want to know more about how it is going Twitter. I am of course working on another project related with our first game in terms of the world building but that will server as a more solid base in terms of world building and character development. A short novel.
I'm going to be working some time in one project and jumping to my game project from time to time to help me go back to shape after these difficult times of pandemic, and many personal issues I've gone through, so please be patient.
About the remake of our first game, it will take time. I want to rewrite the story in short novel format too but it will take time as I'm focused on completing the story arcs I would love to tell with the current one. One thing I can say, is that I will try to reward the owners of the original game but as you may know with a publisher, is something I can't guarantee.
If you have read this whole mess of a message and still want to help out. Please buy the game, here or on Itchi.io. And thank you to everyone that bought the game. We didn't succeed and make a living out of it but we are proud of releasing a game into the world.
New Price!
Soon we will finish the port to android, and later, we will make an update to introduce some small fixes and changes in the PC version.
Again take good care of yourself and please stay home as long as the health authorities require.
A birthday is coming!
Starting Jan. 23, during the Lunar New Year Sale, you'll be able to buy The Tower: The Order of XII at -50% until Jan. 27.
What's the future of the game?
The truth is that The Tower was a very special game from the beginning, we knew that it would not work well because of the type of game that it is no matter how much love we put into it. The results after a while in the market are obvious and citing all copies distributed by Kickstarter, few sales have been generated. In fact, we have barely generated sales to ask to receive the total accumulated. This means that now that we are officially an official studio in eyes of the Spanish government, we cannot allocate capital to a project that does not report benefits for obvious reasons.
This means that the development of the sequels will be greatly affected because, to develop art for story, several assets and programming, the necessary capital must come out of our own pocket. This is not a problem but it takes time.
However we have good news, we have a clear project in hand that advances strongly. Our next game, before developing our first big bet, will be a Trivia game about the video game industry, but with a certain twist to make it more entertaining and fun. Our planes with this game are simple, launch it on all possible platforms, that means PC (Windows, Linux and Mac), Android (IOS may arrive later) and ... Nintendo Switch.
That is our second good news, we have officially been working to get approval from Nintendo and gain access to the development tools for its platform. This means that the experience we get form our new game can be applied to The Tower in the future, just as the Android port of the Trivia could also take a port of The Tower to that platform.
We are very happy with what is coming and we hope that many of you will accompany us along the way.
We do not have a date for our Trivia yet, follow us on Twitter where we will be giving more information about its development and be attentive to our Youtube channel where we will also post things later.
Finally I would like to apologize, leaving aside all the paperwork to form the studio, our lives have been especially complicated lately and we do not have many excuses for our silence. I also apologize for promising something and finally having to ask for more time. Unfortunately we have to eat and a game that does not generate benefits, even though we did our marketing wrong from the beginning, cannot be our main objective.
That is all and until next time.
Update 1.2 & Linux Version Tests Info
Fixes:
- Version indicator now works properly and shows the right version.
- Blocks semitransparent going solid not returning to the default state when player uses respawn function.
- Secrets unlocking but not saving to file when player exits the level before completing it. Now secrets save to file right when they are picked.
Linux Version:
Recently we have tested, although in a light manner, a version of the game for Linux. To be exact we have tested the game in Cinnamon and Ubuntu 19. In both enviroments the game worked just fine but, because the equipment for further testing is out budget at the moment we have decided to for now make this build available only at Itch.io for the moment.
One of the problems we have encounter is permissions, which for now the only way to make it execute the game is to manually tell the "exe" in Linux to allow execute that file as an executable.
If you don't have the game yet and want to play in Linux please take a look to that at Itch.io. When we have tested the game in our own machine, we will make the Linux version public here on Steam.