After 4 Years, We Need To Talk About Twisted Tower

Okay, so I started doing beta testing for a game that I've been working on for four years. And you know, ultimately what beta testing tells you is it tells you whether you've engaged in something called the sunk cost fallacy. Uh the sunk cost fallacy, if you don't know, here, let me pull it up in Google. The sun cost fallacy is a phenomenon whereby a person is reluctant to abandon a strategy or course of action because they've invested heavily in it. Aka uh digging a really really deep hole and spending hundreds of millions of dollars on digging a hole, right? And thinking that because you've invested money in this hole that for some reason it's worth something, right? Um, and often times even if it's clear that abandonment would be beneficial, you still dig the hole, right? That's the sunk cost fallacy. And hopefully you can see why that's relevant to gamedev. Spending all this time and all this

money and effort on making a game only to find out that it's a it's a crappy game. And specifically in this video, I want to focus on four or five different things that I've done over the summer to try and, if I'm being completely honest, try and salvage this thing, salvage this game that I've invested all my time and money on. And I I spent full-time the last, you know, over the summer all the way probably up until March until now, trying to salvage this thing. And hopefully with the beta test results, we'll talk about the beta test results at the end of this video. We're going to talk about whether or not I have officially engaged in the sunk cost fallacy. Now, I wanted to show you really quick just how big how big of a hole have you been digging, Thomas? I'm going to rightclick here. I'm going to right click on my project. This is my Twisted Tower project. It's called Unity R2. Um, I'm gonna click

properties and I'm gonna let this thing Hold on. There we go. I'm gonna let this thing tick up and show you just how big this project is. So, we'll talk about at the end of this video if you know the results of the beta test, but I'm also going to show you the the final file size, the final file size of uh the project. So, really quick, what what is this project that I've been working on? It's called Twisted Tower. I started it four years ago. Um, it started as a really really simple uh, you know, just a simple terrain. Um, a lot of games obviously are going to start this way and it had like a pixelated look to it. Um, I live streamed a lot of this game, guys. So, if you want I I don't think they're public anymore, but um, I live streamed a ton of this game. So, it had a very pixelated, gloomy, sort of retro Silent Hill feel. In fact, I really really like how this looks. But, it ended up looking like this. Right. This is the result of just constant tweaks and changes to the game. Uh making it

feel more like, you know, Willy Wonka, sort of Disney World, Five Nights at Freddy's, but like Bioshock. It's kind of a mixture of all of that. And I was able to do this. I was able to achieve this look and this sort of level of polish. And by the way, just because something has a high level of polish doesn't mean it's actually good. Um we've seen that with a lot of, dare I say, Unreal games lately. A lot of Unreal games are just basically just walking Sims and they all look and play the same. Um, but the way that I was able to achieve this this polished look is I was actually able to make a polished demo. I spent my own time and my own money on that and I was able to submit it to 3D Realms and 3D Realms eventually published the demo. So, effectively, I was able to take a small little 15-minute demo and turn it into a paycheck. Uh, I've done this, by the way. I've done this three different times and I I could tell you how to do it. There's a webinar below. Click the link below and it it looks really gimmicky. I'll admit I need to change this. It looks really gimmicky. It's

not. It's actually a really effective uh webinar. It's like an hour and a half or I think it's an hour long. An hour long showing you how to pitch how to build a demo and pitch it and make money before you even finish it. You could pitch it to to to publishers. You could also p pitch it uh to various crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter. I've done all of this multiple times and I just want to show you how to do it. So, totally free, no gimmicks, no weird stuff, no no shenanigans, click the link below to check that out. And also, if that's not for you, I totally get it. But what you could do is if Twisted Tower looks interesting to you, um, wishlist it. Seriously, click follow or wish list. This says ignore because I've already wishlisted my own game, but you could wishlist it below. So, click the link below and wishlist it. If you're interested in a Bioshocky Willy Wonka type game, this is the game for you. So, check it out below. Okie dokie. So, let's jump into discover all of the things that I fixed in this

game over the summer in preparation for the beta test. And this is all of my beta test results. Um, what was it worth it? Is this game four years of my life? Is it worth it? or have I engaged in the sunk cost fallacy? So, here are the things that I've done uh in in preparation for the beta test. I did a huge huge sprint for optimization and I was left with one final conclusion. Okay, here's the thing and this is going to help you so much in your game, especially if you're making a 3D game. Twisted Tower was running poorly on Steam Deck. Um, and it was also running poorly on just mid-range PCs and even high-end PCs like mine. I was getting people saying, "Hey, Thomas, this this game is bottlenecking at like 98% GPU usage. Like, what is going on?" And so I

thought I I went through every little thing to try and figure out maybe it's the poly count, maybe it's texture compression, maybe it's audio compression, right? What am I doing wrong? Maybe I need to disable all the objects in the scene except for one little section of the level. I found out it was this Unity shadows. By default, meshes that you like even a primitive cube when you put it in Unity, it's casting shadows. By default, the lights are casting shadows. So what there's two things that I did and we'll talk about the second one in more in more detail but the two things are uh I disabled all shadows all shadow casting from meshes and lights and also um added to the options menu to be able to disable all real-time shadows and we'll talk all about the options menu because that's a huge one uh a huge update to Twisted Tower. So, that was a big one. And what I'm

going to do now is, and we'll talk about this as well, uh, is what I'm calling the horror sprint, where I'm going through all the lighting in the game, sprinting through in like a week to make all the lighting look more horror. And I'll show you how to do how to make your lighting look more horror. And I'll open up Unity in a sec. Um, but the reason why I'm turning off all lights from meshes and all lighting in the game, all of it's turned off, is because it's good to start with a base layer kind of ground zero and then you start adding in shadows slowly to what's absolutely necessary and keeping the shadows off for what's not. Okay, so that's that's one big thing that I did is optimization and happy to report that the game is running on Steam Deck at like 40 to 60. Okay, that's what it is currently. I hope that it launches that way, but 40 to 60 FPS. I also did a huge cutscene pass for the game or a sprint, right? Um

software developers would call it a story. I did a cutscene and story story um sprinting and this was all done basically solo. Um and what I mean by that is I'll I'll do I'll use some subs like I a friend of mine, his name is Brin. Um he's incredible. Bin Morrison Elliot. You can find him on Twitter. He's an incredible 3D artist. So, what he did is he used I believe he used ZBrush um along with a Character Creator Pro plugin to create all of the different characters for my cut scenes. Then I took these and I animated them in something called Icone 8. So, this is the first cut scene, so I'm not spoiling anything. Let me turn the sound on.
I didn't think you'd come. My heart, my lips, my body, they're yours. [Music]

Yes. 100%. Yes.
Oh, no. I wanted to see more. show me more. So, that's really what I've been working on is optimization, cutscenes, and incorporating those into this new story that I've been writing. Now, I've done like four or five different cut scenes that took about two or three weeks. Animating all those in Icone 8 was really cool because I clone 8, what's really interesting about and and then I'll shut up about uh the cut scenes, but iClone 8 is really really cool because you can basically take templated animations, mocap animations, and tweak them and change them and use something called uh puppeting. So you can do face puppetry and also armature

puppetry, but you can also not only mix and match all that into pre pre-recorded templates, but you can also use something called Aculips. So I'll take all the new voice acting. I had to re-record all the voice acting with all my voice voice actors and actresses on voices.com. Had to take all of those files and sync them up with something called Aculips, which is basically just a script that will make the mouth move based on the audio. And it's not perfect. So, you have to kind of tweak it. Um, so I did that with the cut scenes. Cutcenes are an incredibly cheap way. It doesn't seem like it. I always steered clear of cutscenes, but cutscenes are an incredibly cheap way um to get really uh incorporate story into your game. You have the reason why it's cheap is because you have a ton of control. You force the player to watch something. You add in dialogue, right? So instead of the player like in HalfLife, instead of the player experiencing the story on

their own terms, you're sort of forcing them to sit down and experience the story you want to tell. So it's a cheap and effective way, especially for indies, to tell a story. So I spent a lot of my time, I think a month, working on these cut scenes. Okay. All right. So, so far it doesn't feel like we fully salvaged the game. Sure, having a bunch of cutscenes, that's cool. But at this point in development, I was still thinking, man, am I digging myself into a hole? Is this cutscene, am I wasting my time and creating these stupid cutscenes to salvage an otherwise stupid game? And perhaps you felt that way. You've wondered, man, every time I do a new task, am I just adding more and more fluff to this game? Am I putting lipstick on a pig? That's another way to put it. So, I moved on to, okay, well,

if if the if the story and the cut scenes aren't going to save the game, if the optimization is not going to save the game, maybe I need to make this game more horrifying. Maybe I just need to go hardcore into the horror. So, what I what I did was I realized that I played Resident Evil 4, the the remaster version, and I realized that one of the reasons why that game is so scary is it's the music. Now, the problem is is that Thomas Brush's music, that's my music, it's moody and ambient, but it's kind of playful. That's kind of the way my music sounds. It's very uh playful and rhythmic and arpeggiated. But I can also do really beautiful um really beautiful like uh let me pull this up here. Melodic music like this.

This is the main menu theme. [Music] Very beautiful, if I do say so myself. Very beautiful. So, I can write that kind of music. I'm not very good at atmospheric stuff. Okay. And so, I ended up hiring Chris Pelazos. Let me pull up his YouTube channel just to give him a big old fat shout out here. I ended up hiring Chris Pelzos for the atmospheric horror stuff. So he did an incredible job writing atmospheric horror stuff. Okay. And so he basically I just told him I said I need stuff that plays in the background. It's almost like white noise, but I also need more combat stuff during combat and it needs to scale. As I'm exploring and slowly encountering more and more and

more enemies, it gets louder and louder and louder and louder. So, this track here is called the Mermaid Palace track. And he wrote this. And you'll notice it's not melodic. It's not like Thomas Brush's D. It's not like that. It's a tonal combat music. And great games, I'll play this in a sec. great games like Resident Evil and even one of my favorite games, Alice Madness Returns. They incorporate a tonal atmospheric horror music during gameplay to not distract the player, but give them a feeling, but then during cutscenes or introductions to levels with stingers or on the menus, you have melodic music. So, I just showed you the melodic music. That was for the menu. This is more for combat right here. It really gets you going. Right.

Oh, and there's scary tones going. Oh, I'm scared. I feel scared, right? Chris did an incredible job here. Okay, more percussion. Yeah, very a tonal, right? So, he did music in layers, an exploring layer. A couple enemies are following you layer and then finally that big combat one. Right? So, there's three layers for each chapter in the game, which are different like thematic worlds like the hotel, then you've got the water park, then you've got the casino, and then you've got the castle, and then you've got the space station. All these different levels for uh or all these different atonal

tracks in layers for each chapter. So, he wrote all of that while I ended up writing different melodic tracks, stingers, or cutscene tracks. So, like this one here is a cut scene track that I sang.
I fell apart when you said goodbye.
So, I wanted something that sounded like the 1950s. I can't hire anybody, so I'm just going to sing. I fell apart when you said goodbye. But then this this was done in like 30 minutes. Um, this is you gotta be scrappy. You got to be really scrappy as an indie game developer. What I ended up doing is I added a bunch of reverb to it and harmonies and then cut off the high end and the low end to get something like this.
Fell [Music]

goodbye. Your love was a dream and I'll wait to wait. I know that you will say goodbye. [Music]
Yeah. So, what's the point? My point is is that I was thinking, how do I salvage this game? Maybe it's the music. And here's the thing. Music, it can salvage a game. it can make a game actually pretty great. Um, and once I incorporated Chris Plays as his music and then also my music for the cut scenes and the stingers and level intros and stuff, suddenly the game felt totally different. And I remember Chris messaged me cuz he was playing the game while he was writing the music. By the way, that's a big trick. If you're writing music for a game or or you have a musician writing music, you want them to play the game while they're writing it. He was playing it and he was like,

"It feels so much better." Music is it's a doorway. It's a doorway sort of introducing introducing the audience to the party. Think about your game like a party. That entrance, the door, put balloons around the door and say happy birthday. That's what the music does. It tells you what's the theme. What is this game about? Is it a story game? Is it an action game? what is this thing? You're informing the player with a single song what this game is. But it's also the second thing it's doing is it's also telling the player how they're supposed to feel during the game. You're trying to hint to the player. Game game development really is. It's like this it's like controlling people's emotions. And so that's what music helps with so much. Music is this weird thing. It's almost spiritual where people are connected and the the the song connects them to to the developer and the developer's

intentions. It's one of the it's a hack. Honestly, it's a it's a really quick trick to get people to feel something immediately. You want them to feel scared, play a scary track. You want them to feel sad or fall in love with the character. Like for example, if I want players to fall in love with Charlotte alongside the protagonist in Twisted Tower, I can kind of force them to do it with just a beautiful song like D. Suddenly you're like, "Oh, I kind of I kind of love Charlotte." Or I could have a song that's like suddenly I'm not in love with Charlotte. I kind of hate Charlotte. It's all just a single song that's doing the work for the developer. So, keep that in mind. Also, when it comes to this horror pass that I'm talking about, remember I'm doing I did this big horror spin sprint in July. I also did a big one with lighting. Okay, now I want to show you this really really quickly here. Lighting is a huge um I was talking

about hacks earlier or tricks to to get the player to feel something. Lighting is massive. Lighting gets the job done. If you want to make the player feel scared, for example, you can do it with lighting. So quickly, there's something called cinematic lighting and then there's also something called practical lighting. Okay, practical lighting is something like this. Okay, this feels a little bit cinematic and I haven't updated the scene because I wanted to show it to you kind of how I'm going to make this feel more cinematic. This definitely feels great, but this is more like practically practically lit. And a lot of game developers try and use practical lighting when in reality they need to be using something like cinematic lighting. And in fact, cinematic lighting is much more better for the game's optimization. Let me explain. Practical lighting is every prefab in your scene has a light. I have a lamp. It has a light. I have string lights. They have lights. I have neon signs. They have lights. That's

practical lighting. Meaning, it's practical. It's realistic. What I try and tell my team and what I've been telling myself this year as a solo developer, even though I have a couple subcontractors, but I'm primarily solo, I have to remind myself, we're not making a game. I'm sorry. We're not making a world, a real world. We're making a game. And the way I even think about it is I'm kind of I'm making a movie. That's kind of how I view this game. It's it's an immersive sim. So, it's kind of like walking through a movie. And so we want to light a scene the same way a director and a and a DP might light a scene. Many of you know this. I like to make short horror films as well. And so when I make a short horror film, the crew behind the camera, we have set up lights and it's a mess. You have the key light and you have the flood light and you have like the hair light or the rim light. It's a mess behind the camera trying to make it look cinematic.

The benefit of game development is we can hide the actual light source. We just put point lights around. We don't have to have massive bulky, you know, flood lights um covering our scene. So, we can put them wherever we want. So, this means that we don't have to be practically lighting things. So, what I have done and what I did in this this horror sprint is I deleted for a lot of the scenes, I went through and deleted most of the lights. Okay? It's kind of like what I did with casting shadows. I just sort of turned off all shadows, turned off all lights. And what I did instead, I'm just going to do this really quickly to show you. What I did instead is I just said, you know what? Let's just use a few lights. a few lights in the scene and I'm gonna make make the game run better because we have way less lights.

Lights lights can really kill performance. They can really kill performance of your game. And what we're going to do is we're going to use one or two lights and they're going to make all the difference. So less lights and lighting, this is so true, less is more. Less lights in a scene are going to make it somehow look better, more horrifying, and more interesting, and more cinematic. So, here's what I mean. Okay, so I've killed all the lights, and you may be thinking, "Wow, the scene doesn't look really different." And you'd be correct. You can get away with a lot more. And you have more control when you have less light. So, I have this one light here. Okay, it's this one. Turning on my gizmo so I can see it. I have this one light here. I'm gonna turn off my gizmos. I'm gonna make it look more cinematic. I'm gonna bump up the intensity, but I'm going to reduce the range. Oh, that's interesting. But Thomas,

that's not realistic. The light would spill over. I don't care. I don't care what's realistic right now. I can also with one light, I can also think better about shadows. Not everything has to have a shadow, okay? Especially when we want it to run on switch and switch two. So, I'm gonna do one soft shadow. Pull this down like to here. And I could say, hm, what would be really cool to have shadows in this scene? Maybe this baby carriage. We'll turn that one on. Do you see why I started with a base layer of no shadows? Because now I could just turn on certain shadows. It's kind of creepy. One there. Let's see what else. That might be cool. One here. Yeah, just casting a shadow right there. That's kind of cool. Maybe this guy here. That's cool. Give some depth there. So, you can see here I'm just like putting

maybe two or three shadows on. And you might be thinking the player is going to wonder why there's no shadow. No, they're not. No, they're not. You might, as a an annoying game developer, you might look, you might be playing the game and think, "Well, there's no shadows there." Gamers are not. They don't care. Really, what we're trying to establish here is mood with shadows and a little bit of depth. So, that's what I did throughout the game. I made it more cinematic with less light. Now, something you could do that's really, really cool, I love doing this, is actually creating complimentary color with shadow or with lights. So, I could take this light here, copy it, and bring it over here. And what I could do is I could say, well, what's the opposite color of orange? What's the opposite color of orange? Is it something like a bluish teal? Like that, right? That cool. And then I just swap out this uh with the right color. I have a teal one. There we go. And maybe this one as well.

Yep. I'm going to kill these lights here. Just for the purposes of this video, trying to be quick here. I'm going to kill these lights. So, yeah, now we have a much more cinematic scene, right, with two lights and only three shadows casting. So, that is efficiency in a nutshell. Efficiency with lighting, making the game feel scarier. I'm just going to kill these so you can see it. And also making it look way, way more interesting. So, that's what I spent a lot of my time in. On top of adding really moody, atmospheric horror music, I went in to every scene and made it look a little bit more interesting and horrifying with way less lights. So, optimizing the game and also making it look really, really scary. Uh, couple things here before we jump into the bait like uh review talking about the beta test results and whether I engaged in the sunk cost fallacy. Uh, another thing

I focused on was, okay, maybe the story sucks. Maybe I got to make this story much better. So, I reworked the entire story, had all of the voice actors and actresses re-record their lines, both for cut scenes and also NPCs in the in in-game moments. Um, I also changed up the gameplay loop interruption, uh, the gameplay loop. One thing that I was told by 3D Realms, which is my publisher, uh, Jason and Chad, shout out to those two, um, they work for the parent company, Saber. Saber makes some awesome games. um they gave generously their time and they played the game and they said, "You need to interrupt the loop. Make the loop a little bit more interesting um when the player's getting bored." So yes, you want a solid loop for your games, guys. You get the key, you open the door, and then you get the new ability, and then you loop and rinse and repeat, but you also want to interrupt that. So, for example, make Twist Mr. Twister, who's the the antagonist in this game, make him take all your weapons away or make the elevator stop working for some reason. turn off all the lights suddenly in the game, right?

Uh have a level that has no enemies and instead you're being hunted by by one Enderman. That's a gameplay loop interruption. So, I incorporated a lot of those into the game and we'll talk about it in the beta test, but it seemed to have worked. Um levels are way too big. So, I change we actually brought down the the size and scale of all the levels. And when I say we, I actually hired Felipe back um for some part-time work. Um, so that was really fun working with Felipe again. Um, who was the original level designer of this game. This one is a big one. Um, this was huge. I redesigned the tower design. This is the original tower design and it looks really cool, you know? I'm like I I was thrilled with this design. It kind of looks like uh Gotham City. Kind of has Batman art deco vibes. The problem is the silhouette of the of the tower looks identical to another castle that's very very very very very very very very very famous. It almost looked identical

and I was like how did this even happen? Um so it looks identical and I got really scared so it changed the design to look more like I don't know I I don't know what you'd call it. Maybe like a German like a old German fairy tale castle. So, this is the design I ended up doing uh for this one. So, I redid all of it. Oh, I'm falling. Hang on. Here we go. We'll go up here. Um, this is the final design that I decided I would land on. I go here. So, that's the final design I landed on. And it looks really good in also posters, but I had to redo everything.
What is this place?
I had to redo the posters in the game. I obviously had to redo the actual model of the castle. So this poster here, I had to redo all of that. I had to redo the menu. I had to redo the cut scenes.

All to avoid, you know, effectively copying a very famous castle. So I worked on that as well. And that took I thought that was going to take a couple a couple weeks, but that actually only took a day, which was really really awesome. Finally, this is the most important thing before we talk about the results of the beta testing. The final thing that I spent or it's not the final thing, it's one of the bit the bigger things that I worked on. And it sounds so lame because I I'm sitting here talking about I I redid the entire castle design and that took a day. You would think that if somebody decided to redo the options menu, it would take well, it maybe take a day. No, the options menu, this was one of the biggest things that I worked on. It took a month. It took a long, long time. And I could show you here why this is so important. And this is very, very relevant to you as well. If I go to the pause menu here, what you want is you want the options menu to cater to the broadest, widest

audience possible. And that's that's something to keep in mind. You don't just launch a game and say, "Well, if your computer can't play my game, too bad, right?" or if it runs at 30 fps, they'll be fine. People will be fine. You really want to give them plenty of options so that they can play your game. So that almost everybody can play your game. So this is especially important here. And there's not a ton of options here, but this is I I I chose the sort of lowhanging fruit. Um all these different options here. Realtime global illumination, volutric fog, real-time shadows, overall settings for change it from ultra to very high to high to low, whatever. Um, display settings, the frame rate, the resolution. This one's a big one. If your game is running slow on certain PCs, if they could drop it down to 1080p or even 720, it'll increase the frame rate significantly. Brightness slider. Oh my goodness. I've played so many indie games on my live streams and

I love you guys. I really do. You know, I love you. Where's the brightness slider? Because a lot of you have horror games. I can't see anything because you have a, you know, this ultra wide monitor with insane brightness levels and then you release the game and you expect everybody else to have your monitor. That's not the way it works. You need to let me boost the brightness for my own monitor. All this stuff here, frame rate limit, VSYNC, all very important. Keybinds, this is huge. Let people rebind the actions for their game. Let people effectively, I mean, we just live in the era of letting people play a game they want to play or the way they want to play it. This takes forever to make. It really does. Um, I think Unreal has a lot of templates, thank god. So, a lot of you who use Unreal, you probably don't have to struggle like I do here, but I'm using Unity. So, having all of this, I had to build all of this

basically um myself. Now, AJ helped create the original options menu. So, thank you AJ. He's a he was a great developer I worked with a couple years ago, but I ended up kind of rehauling overhauling a lot of it. Um, so this was a massive update to the game uh the uh the options. So, all that said, this finally led up to this was a bunch of work over the summer. All of this finally led up to beta testing, which again, beta testing answers the question, am I engaging in the sunk cost fallacy? Have I dug a massive pit that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars that will not result in some kind of payoff. Whether it's good reviews on Steam, whether it's money, you want it to pay off. You want your game to pay off.

And the answer is uh I had people come over and play the game and they've played it in person. And by the way, I highly recommend you you beta testing your game in person at the beginning of the beta test. So get people you really trust that have your best interest in mind, but they're also very honest. Get them to come in person to your home office, to your bedroom, sounds weird, or wherever to test your game in person. You want to watch them play. It's wild. It's absolutely wild. how many issues and they don't even talk about them. A lot of people will just be playing your game and you're thinking they totally missed it. How did they miss the key? Or there was a jump scare there and they didn't even get scared. Why? Or they totally missed that hint or that story moment. They just walked by it. And they're not even going to say it out loud, but you're going to write it down. You're going to say they missed

they missed this poster that they were supposed to see or they missed this character. Tons of issues are going to pop up during your beta test and they're not even going to say it out loud. That's why it's so important to do it in person. Also, something clicks in your head. Uh it's like um the barn doors or the blinders that you have on your eyes when you're making your game alone, they're here and you just don't see certain things. But the moment somebody a second person shows up in your office and starts playing the game, all of a sudden it look it's like this. I don't know why it's it your perception changes when people are with you playing your game. Okay. So, did I engage in the sunk cost fallacy? Have I made a bad game? That's really the end after four years of work. Have I made a bad game? And the answer is no. Uh I'm actually getting really good results. Granted,

I mean, this is outrageous. This is front and back. So many issues. And this is only for the first two chapters of the game. So if you're sitting there and you're thinking, I did an alpha test, Thomas, or people are playing my game and they have all these issues. Oh my word, it's it's going terribly. No, that's just how beta testing goes. This is outrageous, but that's normal. So how did I know that the game is good, though? Because at the end of the day, what I ask players, I say, "What do you think?" So they they they finish playing the game and I say, "What do you think about the game?" And they say, "I loved it. It was amazing. It was so good." And by the way, what I preface with in beta testing is I say, "You're my friend. Um, please save me from launching an embarrassing game by being honest." I preface the whole beta test with that. I say, "Would you rather let me suffer for a decade with a bad game, or would you

rather give me honest feedback now so that I do release a good game in the future?" And it's hard to say that as the developer, but you really do want your beta testers to be honest. So, they need to feel a freedom to be honest and hurt your feelings, right? So, I I'll always say, "Give me a give me a number. I'll say, out of 10, how would you rate the game?" And it might even be clearer if you say, "What do you think the Metacritic score will be?" And they could say, "Uh, maybe a seven, maybe an eight." So I, you know, for me, the people I've tested with, they're giving me, uh, eight out of 10, sometimes nine. Um, and that's with the first two chapters of testing. So, so far, the beta testing is going incredible. Plenty of bugs, plenty of things to fix. So, yeah, that's an update for the game, guys. Hope that was really, really fun and helpful to you. Feel free to wishlist the game below. If it's something you're, this is a really big tip. This is a huge tip. If you're a game developer watching right now, quit

on Twitter or wherever you are, Blue Sky or whatever, quit manipulating people into giving you wish lists. Into giving you wish lists. I see people posting, game devs posting, I can't get any wish list. Please wish list below. Or, I've had a really hard day. Please wish list below. I've worked on this for years. Please wish list below. That's a terrible way to get wishless. The reason why is not only is it annoying, but it's also frustrating because or it shows that you don't understand how the Steam algorithm works. You don't want 100,000 wish lists of people who are being sympathetic to you because what? They're not going to buy the game. And then the algorithm is going to be real confused. The algorithm is going to the Steam algorithm is going to go Okay, this person has 100,000 wish lists, but they're at a 1% conversion rate. Must suck. The game must suck. No, you just got really, really boring, what you would call cold leads. They're

people who don't actually care about the game. So, please wishlist Twisted Tower only if this looks interesting to you. If Twisted Tower looks interesting to you and it's like looks like a game up your alley, please click the link below, check it out. Also, if that's not interesting to you, what might be interesting to you is this webinar. Um, if you want to learn how to turn a demo into six figures, man, I know that sounds sleazy. And I know that sounds like I'm tricking you. I'm not. I've done it three times. I I've always secured paychecks with demos. I make a demo, I sell it to a publisher, whether it's Armor Games, Serenity Forge, or 3D Realms. I've always done that. Or Kickstarter campaigns. I've done two Kickstarter campaigns, crowdfunding campaigns, raising money for a game based on just a pitch or a concept or a demo. Click the link below, sign up for this. It's not gimmicky. You can watch it at your own pace. I'm not going to ask for anything from you with this webinar. So, just click the link below. It's totally free. It's my treat to you. All right. I hope that was helpful. I hope that was fun, guys. I love you. Thanks for hanging out. Cheers.