Seasons greetings Interdimensional travellers,

We have just pushed 1.4 live for everyone, just in time for the holidays.

Most of us have been deep into our various tasks for realizing the content for Act 2, but we’ve still racked up a solid list of fixes and improvements to the overall Act 1 experience based largely, once again, from all of your feedback and reports. So, thank-you!

Click HERE for a rundown on all of the stuff we’ve fixed as well as a disclosure of the known issues that we are still working to track down. The most notable addition is - Act 1 Steam achievements! There are now 50 achievements that help illustrate just how much story and content is in the game at this time.

The Tower is on sale during the current Winter Sale (21% off on the 21st!). We would like to make a note that this price during the 2017 Winter Sale will be the lowest price The Tower will be offered at for at least a year and probably longer.

A FEW WORDS FROM US…

We’re a tiny developer with a grand vision for what we want The Tower to become when it is finished. This is a work of passion, and its creation comes from a deep belief and vision for what is possible with interactive first-person gameplay, beyond just enabling hyper-addictive and visceral commercial money making products. More than just simple entertainment, we’re striving for The Tower to become a deeply immersive role-playing experience through which one’s imagination is fueled by an interactive ride that will differ for each and every person strapping themselves in.

We’ve recently come to the realization that the Consortium games are, when boiling it all down, about the evils of corporate homogenism and the steady and continued erasure of originality in commercial art and entertainment. In fact, the the entire story and the answers behind all of its mysteries all link to this theme.

By buying our game now, you are supporting our ability to fully realize this vision. Last year, before the Fig campaign, we had no game whatsoever. Instead, we put forth a vision we had for a game in the form of mocked up pre-production videos. A few thousand people reached into their wallets, literally fueling this project's existance.

So now that it’s playable, the reason for our Early Access foray is to find more gamers that want to see us realize all of the potential for a new kind of single-player narrative game, based on what we’ve managed to create so far.

THE ROADMAP

! SPOILER ALERT ! For those of you who want to be entirely surprised by where you get to go in the Tower and how the game will progress…you might want to avoid looking too closely at the chart linked below.



This chart roughly encapsulates the remaining level work that needs doing to complete the remainder of the game. The colors of the boxes indicate how much work has been done on them so far, and how close they are to being completed. Generally speaking, the darker the blue, the closer they are to completion.

The dark blue boxes are all Act 1, and are currently accessible in the game. Our next big push is to get all of those “almost playable” levels to Early Alpha so we can begin testing them! Act 3 consists of one big level - the Churchill Tower Power Facility, at the center of the Tower.

So, moving forward, our plan is really quite straightforward:

[*]We will steadily continue to fix, improve and debug Act 1 gameplay based on ongoing feedback, while simultaneously bringing all of Act 2’s levels to a fully playable state.
[*]Once Act 2 is playable, we will be inviting our Earliest Access Fig backers to dive in. After testing and fixing for awhile with just our closest backers, we will bring Act 2 online here on Steam for even greater testing. The base price will rise at this point, to $29.99.
[*]Sometime in here we will do another round of voice over recordings for Act 1 and big chunks of Act 2. More robot voices will be replaced by final voices. Principal choreography will also finally begin, with a ton of finalized scenes ready for animations and final character models. Casting of all the remaining characters will be completed by this point.
[*]Once Act 2 of the game is working here on Steam, we will continue to fix, improve and debug Act 1 and 2 (though Act 1 should be pretty solid by then!). As choreography is completed for Act 1 and 2 scenes, subsequent updates will include those. Meanwhile, after clearing out major Act 2 issues, will will be focussing on realizing the climax of the game, Act 3. Act 3 is about 10% or less of the total game. It’s the final environment, the final challenge, and it’s where everything culminates.
[*]Once Act 3 is playable, we will once again invite our most loyal backers to dive in and start testing. This will continue on until reaching BETA.
[*]Once the entire game’s story and gameplay are in place, we will then perform a final Voice Over recording pass, allowing for the completion of all of the game’s choreography.
[*]Principal choreography is completed, and we officially enter BETA, resulting in a huge update here on Steam.
[*]Once in BETA, we will be testing the now largely finished game. Final game balancing and bug fixing will occur, with zero new features being added. Once we’ve got the entire game in a solid spot with at least a few months of being in BETA…
[*]The Game is done! Release V1.0, yay! The game’s price will jump up at this point to its final spot, at $34.99. Ongoing support will continue forth indefinitely from that point, and we have plans to give the community access to our dev tools and integrate the game with Steam Workshop.

In addition, throughout the entire process, we will be steadily polishing and improving the already established core mechanics based on all feedback that we receive.

As far as dates and deadlines are concerned, there are none. The official release date for V1.0 of The Tower is “When It’s Done”. But, as you can hopefully see, we have a concrete plan for the game being “done,” we just feel that quality trumps time restraints.

According to our original minimum budget plan, we have been taking on other jobs at this stage in order to be able to afford to keep developing the project. All this means is that we can't accurately predict WHEN we'll get the game done. However, the road ahead is about steadily and surely building the required content for the completed narrative based on our now well established mechanics and systems. We will get there.

It is a simple fact that the more sci-fi immersive sim fans that discover and buy our game, or back us on Fig to support us, the faster we’ll be able to move through the roadmap. Each and every purchase gives us more of an ability to progress faster through the above steps and to improve the final quality of the game.

Regardless, we encourage you to look no further than our own company’s history to see how stubborn and determined we are about realizing a Consortium game. Dedication is not something we lack!

Our first crowdfunding attempt back in 2012 for making the first CONSORTIUM (also now on Sale, and you can transfer saves made in it to The Tower for an even deeper story!) didn't work. But we persisted. Our attempt to raise our minimum budget for The Tower on Kickstarter also didn't work. We persisted. Realizing the dream of the Consortium universe is really the ultimate dream. It’s about the dream of us, as humans, being capable of creating a much better world than the one we currently inhabit. Of striving to be much better than we currently are.

It’s about hope. So, on that note…

HAPPY HOLIDAYS!!

We invite you all to come say hi on our Discord server, or to make a post or two on our Forums.

We will leave 2017 with a slogan that we had on a banner on the wall of our Indie MegaBooth at Pax Prime 2014 when showcasing the first Consortium game:

“Consortium: The cradle of utopia – The fragility of mankind”

Wishing you all a wonderful holiday season, and here’s to a hopeful, prosperous and peaceful 2018 for all of us!

Cheers!!

– Gregory and the iDGi team

p.s. 2121….21.