Thomas Brush

The Twisted Tower demo is officially here. Play it now, and be sure to wishlist if you enjoyed it! store.steampowered.com/app/1575990/Tw…

Just because your game looks better doesn't mean it looks better

@BrubyM Fixed

@thomasbrushdev Just so you know, the discord invite link in the google form for participants doesn’t work / is expired.

Another day of beta testing fixes for Twisted Tower. if you submitted the beta form, but haven't heard from me, I'm still slowly opening up the gates for beta testing. The thing is: I want to get a small sample size first (about thirty players right now). Otherwise, hundreds of players will report hundreds of the same silly bugs on Day 1, which distracts me from smaller more hidden ones, but also, hurts the perception of the overall game (meaning I get feedback that is negative because players will get annoyed with obvious, distracting bugs more than enjoy the game).

@ILokasta Exactly

@thomasbrushdev smart move keeping it to 30 first. the worst beta feedback is when people report the same obvious thing 200 times and you lose the signal on the stuff that actually matters

I made a game world that creates itself as you journey through it…

I want to be BURIED under Mickey's Haunted Mansion.

@the_OPX I think honestly it does actually work. Let me look and see here...

@thomasbrushdev Oh no 😱 This is impossible then. Sorry for mentioning that. Damn you Unity!!! 😄

@the_OPX Sure but I'll need to delay the game by a year

@thomasbrushdev Thomas, will you support 21:9? A proper shooter should...

@SagelessRanger immensely!

@thomasbrushdev how much has the beta test changed from the demo?

@glutentaco hahah yep

@thomasbrushdev Lowercase i. Not AI. Trustworthy feedback is essential.

Getting solid results from the beta test for Twisted Tower. Here's what one player said. Really encouraged!

@tumblewedgames Your computer will explode. But it's by design.

@thomasbrushdev How does it run at 240p?

Should I default to 1080p for most players for Twisted Tower (allowing them to play at 4k if they want in the options)? The game runs buttery smooth at 1080p, and 2k. But some beta testers are playing it at 4k and they really shouldn't be. It's chugging for them but they don't know to reduce the resolution

@B_rad12G Yes exactly

@thomasbrushdev For the casuals and majority of players, 1080p will be perfectly fine and look good. For the "experts" out there, playing with 4k hardware and monitor, they will be the people that immediately click options before starting a game to go through graphics settings anyway.

@RVTaarling @TheGennadiy @JasozzGames Yep did this morning and it works great now.

@thomasbrushdev @TheGennadiy @JasozzGames Simply remove anything removed from the world origin at a certain range. I had some very similar issues with my physics based vr project and this eventually fixed it.

WELL WELL WELL. Apparently there's HUNDREDS of game objects that are falling infinitely in Twisted Tower. This is why you BETA TEST. My goodness... thanks to @JasozzGames for reaching out last night and letting me know this is a problem to watch out for in Unity. If this many physics objects start falling, the physics will break eventually in the game. This was a tricky one. Basically, these are rigidbodies that are triggers. So they fall, and NOTHING is ever going to stop them. Lol what a relief to find this.

Hahah awesome. I did this as well a month ago (problem is it was NOT capturing TRIGGER colliders that were falling). I also heard a dev friend of mine today did the same thing. It's funny how a lot of devs end up doing these "band aid" solutions because ultimately, it's basically all you can do! I also added a rigidbody checker every 5 seconds that kills anything outside of a 1000 unity meter radius.

@thomasbrushdev @JasozzGames Nightmare flashbacks for both Ori games. We ended up adding a special plane collider low enough under the world that kills anything that hits it. Tracking total number of active rigid bodies (and total too) and seeing if it climbs up is quite helpful as well.

@TDeckverse What

@thomasbrushdev "But some beta testers are playing it at 4k and they really shouldn't be." - weird take, by all means. Isn't it more of an amazing opportunity for you to see what's the rendering bottleneck, that keeps creeping in the background unnoticed, until you play at 4k?

@Gouzoo @JonatanErsarp It does have a built in upscaler

@thomasbrushdev @JonatanErsarp Ive worked in both Unity and Unreal. I dont think Unity has a built-in upscaler so locking resolution will look bad in my experience, but you should look into Upscalers I think!

@JonatanErsarp Because it's running slowly on their PC and many players won't know that changing to 1080p will make it much faster

@thomasbrushdev Sure, but saying players shouldn't be playing in 4K makes very little sense. I have a 4K monitor, why shouldn't I play in 4K?

@BaldieAndBaldie Yay!

@thomasbrushdev Thomas, the game is really really good. The jump in quality, look and feel, and most importantly gameplay from demo to beta is extremely noticeable.

This was the final score during the beta test of Pinstripe almost a decade ago. This is the score on Steam. Very interesting. Super close. I'm fascinated by how well beta testing predicts Steam review scores.