Tower of Spirit 1.0 is finally available and “finished”. I know that this surprise release with no announcement or any kind of prior communication may come as a surprise, I'm not going to lie to you, Tower of Spirit is still not in a state that suits me 100%. But I believe achieving such a result is impossible today for several reasons which have slowed down the game's development for 2 years now, affecting my mental health and my desire to work on this game.
Where all begin
I'm a self-taught developer. I started early 2021, developing a metroidvania on my own inspired by Hollow Knight. I learned programming, drawing and 2D frame by frame animation on this project, but a year later, I was still a long way from being able to show it off publicly, or to predict any kind of release date. It was a complex project, too ambitious for me and built on shaky foundations. After this year working on it, I made the difficult decision to kill the project. The idea was to start something new, with a drastically reduced scope, releasable in a few months on steam with a view to using it as a calling card to get a job in the industry. That's how Tower of Spirit was born. The idea was born in January 2022 and released in July of the same year on Steam in Early Access.
Failure and Opportunity
Unfortunately, I didn't do a very good job with the marketing campaign, as communication really started a week before release. When the game was released, it had less than 100 wishlists. But that wasn't the only reason for his failure, or even the main one in my opinion. On release, the game was very short and sorely lacking in content (only one area with 4 different enemies, a single boss, 4 playable characters and some twenty emblems) and depth. A lot of time had been spent on the visual aspect of the game, and in particular its animations (over 500 frames at the time, all drawn and colored by myself). A lot of game design issues result both from the speedy development and my lack of experience and knowledge. So, unsurprisingly, the game didn't live up to expectations. At that time, I was starting to run out of money and needed to find a solution quickly, so I signed up for my first professional event in France. This event end up changing a lot in my life. I met a lot of cool devs and some publishers. That’s how I ended up working at an indie studio as a programmer even with my lack of knowledge and experience at the time.
Complicate experience and hiatus
The job opportunity meant I had less time to focus on Tower of Spirit. And it becomes more and more painful to go back to the project while working full on other games. The experience at the studio was not that great either, most of my coworkers were really nice people, but management was problematic and ended up causing a lot of serious issues. We had layoff, harassment, impulsive, bad decisions and no reconsideration even when it was clear those provoked more and more issues. It was almost impossible for me to work on ToS at the time and the more time I spent outside of this game the less I wanted to go back. That is why the game received very few patches and content updates and I’m sorry for that.
Long story short, by the end of my contract, I had the opportunity to work on some prototypes for another studio. This studio was also a publisher, and a few months later they made a really amazing offer to me: financing my next game. Since last December, that’s what I've been doing full time: working on a brand new game. Obviously, Tower of Spirit was not progressing much. I still had the desire to finish it properly at the time, so I hired an artist to compose a brand new soundtrack. I prepared a lot of changes, new content and mechanics but all of this was really demanding, and I ended up not finishing anything again. Someone suggested to me that ToS was the reason I refused to take a long break from work or holidays, because it was still there, in a corner of my brain. whispering “hey, still a lot of work to do before completion!”. It’s hard to work on a game where there is no perspective of success and any content demands so much work (mostly because of the animation, but also because the code foundations were very poorly made). I've considered taking the game off steam several times so as not to have to finish it. It's also been suggested that I release it as is, with no new content. But all these options seemed impossible, and even if the game only had a small number of players, I didn't want to let down all my efforts. But no progress was made.
Ending
Two weeks ago, I talked about the game with some friends. For some reason, it clicked. I had a deadline (which is today), an idea of how to complete a very contained version of the game I wanted. It would not be perfect, far from that, but it would be okay to play and enjoy a few hours. It was my first game after all, I made a lot of mistakes doing it, but at the same time I learnt a lot from them and grew as a game dev. ToS offered me a chance in the industry, it was time to close this chapter. Thanks to all players, I hope this version will bring you some enjoyment.
================================================================================
Patch notes:
New Content
- Fight the final boss of the game to conclude the adventure!
- Tower of Spirit got a brand new original soundtrack composed by @miguelangell960 (talented artist who also work on Tiny Rogues’ music).
Other Changes
- Reworked Max HP, Max MP and Emblem Chest bonus icons to reflect more clearly the purpose of those rewards.
- The shop encounter has been redesigned and now up to 3 random emblems and HP, MP or Emblem Point upgrade to buy. It should allow players more flexibility.
- During events, your active party of characters stay on the screen and face the event. The events interface has been slightly reworked.
- Characters now run out of the screen when you beat the boss of the area. Transition time and animation have been improved.
- Changed loading screen between areas, displaying some sort of a map of the current run.
Bug Fixes
- Fixes an issue with Pandy capacities that could lock the game during a battle.
- Fixes an issue with the randomness of the emblem, causing multiple rolls of the same emblem.
- Fixes an issue with several emblems costing more EP than expected.
- Fixes an issue with damage calculation, ignoring certain conditions.