Good day, Townsfolk, and we hope you’re well! I’m happy to report that development is continuing on Tower, and we are making progress. In the meantime, we’ve taken a look at all of the questions you asked in the last blog survey and whittled them down into a Q&A session. There’s responses from a few folks on the team here at Alta, including myself, Boramy, Sol, and James. We hope that the answers to these questions will provide insight into what’s happening here at the studio, as well as who we all are!

1. Where is your team located?
Cayde: Members of our team are located all across the globe. We have a main branch in New South Wales, Australia, but many of our team work remotely from places like the UK, Washington state, Florida, California, and even South Africa!

2. What features do the devs look forward to implementing most?
Sol: Combat refinement! Our current combat system does its job, but I think there’s a lot of room for improvement. The trials were really fun to work on, but they highlighted some of the shortcomings of our current combat system. I’m looking forward to being able to give combat some more attention and making the system deeper and more interesting!

3. Will the tower still be speedrunner friendly after the updates?
Boramy: For existing players who have been speed-running the Climbing Tower, the most notable difference will be that the earlier portions will have changed since their original course. These sections have been made a bit easier for new players to get into, whilst still being an interesting challenge. If you're a speedrunner, you'll likely find your time in these early portions to improve, but I don't see the speed-running aspect of the tower really dampened. You'll find a way, I know you will.

4. How are you going to implement the climbing mechanic, like what materials you can climb on?
Boramy: Climbing will be very similar to how the current PC version of climbing is, albeit a bit easier. The point of the Climbing Tower is that upon completion, you can climb almost anywhere in the game world. During key challenges, similar to the combat trials, you'll be limited on what you can climb to offer some platforming-esque challenges akin to those in the tower.

5. What will the differences between quest and PC be, for things like, the climbing tower?
Boramy: We're aiming to have the new changes to the tower be the same for both PC and Quest players. This is part of our objective to bring the two game versions closer and closer together, especially from a gameplay perspective.

6. What do you think was the most complicated thing you've added, code-wise or mechanic-wise?
Sol: The trials, no question. So much went into the design and refinement of it, and implementing anything that large comes with a whole host of difficulties. I’m super happy with how they turned out though!
James: Server migration. While it’s not finished yet, it’s a very complex part of the background services that players don’t get to see much, but is really rewarding to work on once we got all the moving parts working in tandem!

7. How do you plan to implement the features from PC VR to Quest, and once implemented, will it affect the current graphics?
Boramy: With a lot of careful deliberation, a lot of the features we made were implemented with a small team that was cranking out new things fast and loose. This meant there were definitely bugs and performance issues. Now that our team is bigger, we're working to the best of our ability to produce far more polished work. With these new foundations, we have the chance to look at our existing mechanics and make sure they hit their objectives in the grand plan for the game. Graphically, there may be minimal changes as objects get moved around, but ultimately the goal is to improve the look, feel and most importantly the gameplay of the game across all platforms.

8. When is the merchandise store coming back?
Cayde: The merch store is a seasonal consideration at this point. We’re still working out logistics and shipping, to make sure we don’t have to put limits on who can order items (and that they will arrive in a timely manner). It’s not gone forever, though, so don’t fret– We’ve got some plans for new merch in the future, just as soon as all that is solved!

9. Will we, at some point, either get a new roadmap-like thing, or the ability to vote on what updates we want in what order?
Cayde: The Roadmap is being replaced with Alta Logs for the time being, as they provide more clarity into the process and what features include while in development. We will be updating as much as we possibly can in posts, as well as providing opportunities like this Q&A for you all to ask questions. We want to make sure we are all on the same page going forward, and sometimes the Roadmap didn’t offer enough explanation into certain things, which led to some confusion. Hopefully a more structured process will help with that– whether it stays just blogs, or it’s added to in the future!

10. Are you close to finishing the game, or do you want to have more stuff added?
Sol: I don’t think we’ll ever truly “finish” the game. We all have TONS of stuff we want to improve or add to the game. We’ll keep adding content for as long as you guys stick around!

That’s all we’ve got for this round! If your question wasn’t answered here– it may come up in the next session, so keep an eye out going forward. Hopefully, some of these responses shed a little light into what we’re thinking about and developing at the moment. We’re working hard to bring you the best version of A Township Tale that we possibly can, and we’ll be back with another Log in about two weeks. As always, thank you– see you soon, Townies!

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