Community Playtest 1 Wrap-up!
[p]Thank you all so much for participating in our very first community playtest! We are genuinely blown away by the response. The amount of time you all put into writing up feedback, reporting bugs, and sharing your experiences with us has been incredible, and we couldn't be more grateful for this community's support and enthusiasm. Seriously, you're awesome.[/p][p][/p][h2]So... What's next?[/h2][p]Our goal is to release our official Steam demo early in 2026. In the meantime, we're excited to start implementing more community concepts and will be running additional community playtests to gather feedback on new content.[/p][p][/p][p]For Community Playtest 2, we'll be focusing on expanding the game in several key areas:[/p][p][/p][p]♾️ Endless Mode[/p][p]To really lean further into the roguelike nature of the game, we want to add an endless mode which spawns increasingly difficult waves of enemies, testing your defenses to their absolute limit. This mode will come with a leaderboard, allowing you to compete to discover the most powerful synergies.[/p][p][/p][p]🧲 New enemies[/p][p]We want to add more units with distinct strengths and weaknesses. One of our first tests will be metallic enemy types, such as significantly heavier units that can be pushed or pulled by magnetic towers, or copper enemies that force Tesla towers to target them before other units.[/p][p][/p][p]🗼 New towers[/p][p]We want to encourage creative contraptions as a core part of the game. To do that, we want to add new basic towers that focus on creating more meaningful interactions between towers. Instead of just adding more explosions, we want to keep expanding on the physics properties in the game. The first set of towers we're testing will relate to the magnetic enemies mentioned above.[/p][p][/p][p]🧰 New modules[/p][p]The playtest module pool was incredibly limited and will be expanded. Ultimately, we want the module pool to feel rich and diverse, leading to more truly unique strategies.[/p][p][/p][p]🪙 Shop redesign[/p][p]We'll be updating the shop with added features like shop cycling and card removal to provide more opportunities to target specific strategies (especially important as we add more content).[/p][p][/p][p]⚖️ Game balance[/p][p]You all did a phenomenal job exploring the available strategies in the game. One of our core goals with Tower Lab is to encourage combining towers by exploiting physics to really amplify their power. With the limited content in this playtest (and even more limited interactions), we haven't been able to fully test the deeper gameplay here yet. We want to make it so just putting a bunch of towers down facing the level won't be powerful enough to climb the leaderboard - the real power should come from creative combinations.[/p][p][/p][p]🛠️ Bug fixes and core design improvements[/p][p]We'll be working through many of the issues you have helped us identify, primarily:[/p]
- [p]Enemies getting stuck on roofs/towers with no way down[/p]
- [p]Enemies being able to sneak past towers due to limitations and a lack of control in the timing system[/p]
- [p]General UI and aesthetic improvements (we're always iterating on these!)[/p]
- [p]New building types! We're evaluating adding Traps back into the game - buildings that can be placed on or replace platforms and other new types such as moving towers.[/p]
- [p]Levels with unique mechanics like pressure plates that activate traps, moving platforms, or outright boss encounters[/p]
- [p]Procedurally generated levels & map editor[/p]