Launching Towers of Aghasba into Early Access

Title card of Towers of Aghasba — Towers of Aghasba

For the past 3.5 years, I’ve worked as a game designer at Dreamlit Games on Towers of Aghasba. And on November 19th, 2024, we released on Steam and PS5 into Early Access in what could only be called a “rough launch”. It’s exactly two months since our launch, and things have settled down, but let me tell you… it wasn’t easy getting here.

From the lead up to the release, the chaotic launch day, how we responded to get reviews from Mostly Negative to Mostly Positive, and the rollercoaster of emotions I experienced during it all… I want to talk about it.

Few milestones matter to game developers more than launching a game. Because making games is hard, and in the current state of the industry just ensuring that your game isn’t canceled mid-development is an achievement on its own.

The games industry however has notoriously been incredibly secretive with what happens behind the scenes and I’m hoping this shines some light on what it’s like.

Also sharing your feelings on the internet is cheaper than therapy…

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What is Towers of Aghasba

Towers of Aghasba is a third-person open-world adventure with city building and ecosystem growing elements, where you play as a junior architect trying to restore your ancestral homeland of Aghasba by restoring its dead ecosystems and building settlements across the island.

The unique aspect of the game is its ecosystem gameplay. While most builder games have you just taking things from the world, Towers of Aghasba has you restore and maintain the ecosystems of your island while rebuilding your civilization. It’s also wrapped in this beautiful Ghibli-inspired art style with some incredibly gorgeous landscapes and unique creatures.

The game also has rich lore for the player to discover, not just from the narrative and questline, but also from exploring the world by climbing up its tall mountains, gliding across its valleys, riding your mount across its plains, and swimming to the depths of the waters surrounding the island.

If you thought this is an ambitious project for a new indie studio’s first game… you’d be right. We are also a small studio with less than 30 devs, so needless to say there’s was a LOT we needed to do. That’s exactly why we decided to launch in Early Access. While the initial launch version would be a shadow of what we envision for the game, the hope is that we continue updating the game constantly throughout Early Access to eventually realize our intended vision for the game.

We even put out a public roadmap showcasing our intended evolution of the game.

The Lead-up to the launch

In an ideal world, the version of the game that is released on the launch date is locked, or “gold”, at least a month prior, with a day-1 patch finalized a week before launch at the latest.

In reality, that’s as likely in modern game development as Valve releasing Half-Life 3 in this lifetime.

If I was to describe the weeks leading up to the launch in one word, it would be “anxiety”. There was a LOT for us to do within an extremely tight timeline and budget to just get it to an Early Access launch level. And being an indie studio, everyone had to wear a number of hats.

Even though I’m a game designer, apart from the usual content improvements, polish, and bug-fixes that I’d be expected to handle before launch, I was also handling writing marketing copies, community management, ensuring we passed both Steam and Playstation’s guidelines, making plans to address some early feedback we had received from pre-launch reviewers, and even some project management. Are you really indie if you’re not sticking your fingers into every pie you possibly could?

In the end, we completed our launch version 1 week before launch, with the day-1 patch cutting it to the wire and going out the night before the game’s release!

What could go wrong?!?!

The moment we launched

As I watched the countdown on my own PlayStation 5 reach 0, I felt what could only be described as the highest of highs. This was the moment I had spent the past few years and several sleepless nights working towards. It was surreal and I couldn’t wait to hear about how our players enjoyed the experience we created.

I immediately loaded up our game’s Discord server, and my emotions crashed to the lowest of lows faster than a crypto price after a rug-pull. Because the messages started flooding in about a crash at launch on PS5. I booted the game on my own PS5, only to see the crash happen to me as well.

As more people squeezed into our Discord with issues and complaints, it became clear that it was going to be an incredibly long launch day for us.

What went wrong

As with doing anything for the very first time, we became another example of Murphy’s Law. Because anything that could go wrong, did go wrong.

At launch, the game instantly crashed for everyone on PS5.
- The last minute update we made the night before introduced an unexpected issue that caused a crash only on PS5.
Players had a different expectation of what our multiplayer experience offered.
- Despite our attempts at messaging our multiplayer experience to be more akin to Animal Crossing, where you could merely visit other player’s islands and see how it’s been developed, players were disappointed that they could not progress quests together.
Several game-breaking bugs and crashes
- Many players experienced a vast number of crashes and bugs that did not allow them to progress or even play the game properly.
- There was an issue with a plugin we used that would crash the game for anyone with an AMD graphics card.
The lack of several quality-of-life features
- The game launched without several features that players expected in a modern open-world game with exploration and building gameplay.
Updates broke saves
- In our attempts to quickly fix issues and improve the game, some updates corrupted saves and caused several players to lose hours of progress.

This is hardly a comprehensive list of the issues that the game had on launch, but these are definitely the main reasons to why on the first day, the game had only a very negative rating on Steam, and a 2/5 on PS5.

Our response

After taking a moment to scream into a pillow, I joined the rest of the Dreamlit team to come up ways to put out the fires. The immediate response for the massive PlayStation crash was to revert to the gold version from the week prior, allowing players to start playing the game till we could isolate the root of the problem. That got us out of the immediate predicament.

Then, we turned our attention to our “Mostly Negative” Steam reviews. There were several that we expected and already had solutions for, while others spring up unexpectedly like a pimple on your face on date night.

After 2 months however, we now sit at an Overall rating of “Mixed”, with recent ratings of “Mostly Positive”. Nowhere close to where we want to be, but definitely heading in the right direction. We managed this by doing a number of things over the past two month.

Listening to the community

Created Bug and Suggestion Forums on our Discord for our community to easily share their issues and thoughts.
On Steam, pressing F7 would open a “Send Feedback” popup that the player could use to instantly report bugs.
These let us easily identify the biggest issues our players had with the game and prioritized them in our updates.

Bug Reporting on Discord — The bug reporting forum on Discord

Suggestions on Discord — The suggestions forum on Discord.

Players could send feedback directly from the game on Steam.

Consistent Updates and patches

Since launch, we’ve had 8 major patches, along with a number of hotfixes that addressed some of the biggest complaints, feedbacks, bugs, and crashes reported by players.

Constant communication and transparency

Diligent open communication with the community as often as possible.
Sharing what issues we are working on and when fixes could be expected.
Updating players constantly on when patches go out, with comprehensive details in the patch notes with regards to what has been fixed and what else we are working on.
Releasing public statements acknowledging the setbacks from launch and highlighting the work we are doing to fix issues and improve the game.

Reshaping our roadmap

From listening to the community, reshaping our roadmap to prioritize features that are more highly requested to come sooner.
Larger focus on more quality of life and accessibility features to improve the player experience.
Revamping the multiplayer experience sooner than planned to cater to player requests to allow quest progression in multiplayer.

We’re also working on significant updates to our multiplayer to allow players to progress quests together. This was something that we had planned to release MONTHS down the line. But with this being THE MOST requested feature from our community, and a major proportion of our negative reviews, we felt it was essential to prioritize this feature.

While all this has been exhausting to do, there’s no denying that it has had a huge impact. It doesn’t undo the impact of our shaky launch, and there are still a significant amount of issues and player complaints for us to address. But the most important thing our work so far has earned us is the trust of our community. The players know that we are listening to them and are constantly working on improving the game. In the end, all we want is to provide a unique and fun experience to our players, and the most important thing we’ve achieved so far is the faith and trust that our community has in us towards achieving that.

The game in its current state is nowhere close to being perfect. But it’s incredible to see just how much fun so many of our players are having with the world we’ve created. We’ve seen hundreds of reviews talking about how unique, fun, and beautiful the world is. How the quest line and narrative has them hooked. How our ecosystem gameplay is unlike anything they’ve seen before. And most importantly, how open, transparent, and passionate the development team was with the community.

Why was the launch rough?

As proud as I am with how we’ve responded to us stubbing our toe with the launch of Towers of Aghasba, the ideal scenario is that it wasn’t in a rough state to begin with. And it’s a fair question to wonder why it launched in the state that it was anyway.

In our case, there were a number of reasons for it:

We’re a new indie studio

A lot of established studios usually take systems and tools from their previous project and build on top of it. But when a new studio like ours is established, there are several things that need to be figured out. We need to create new pipelines and develop systems from scratch. We spend a considerable amount of our resources in just figuring things out.

Lack of time and budget

Being a new indie studio, we have an extremely limited budget. That means that there is a time limit on how long we can stay in development without earning any revenue. We had a set time limit by which we bring the game out, and had to get as much done within that timeline as possible. So we were in a constant battle between getting features functional, polishing and refining these features, and testing these features for issues and bugs.

Extremely ambitious project

Towers of Aghasba is ambitious for the fact that it tries to combine several different types of gameplay systems into a relatively new experience in a vast open-world with a AAA standard visual fidelity while being an indie studio. We are a small, fully remote team of around 30 people trying to achieve something that would usually require 100s of devs. This often leads to us being stretched very thin, resulting in mistakes or the inability to develop and polish the features needed for such an ambitious game.

You could argue that we took way too many risks and should’ve tempered our scope to be a lot more feasible. But the video game industry is one where more often than not, playing it safe does not pay off. The video game market is incredibly saturated, and we needed to stand out from the already crowded survivial-builder genre. The reason Towers of Aghasba achieved any type of attention at all was because we were being ambitious and trying to create something unique.

None of this excuses the state of the game at launch though. Despite being early access, players spend money and time on what we’ve created and they deserve something that they can still enjoy, have fun with, and have faith in growing into its aspired final form.

It’s on us to keep refining and polishing the game till it does live up to our player’s expectations, as well as realizing our final vision for the game. It’s still going to be a journey to get there, but we at least both our community and us as developers have faith that we’ll get there.

Conclusion

I’ll be straight with you. The initial launch was a disappointment. Not just for a lot of our players, but for us as the developers as well. It’s something we’ve publicly acknowledged, with our game director releasing a video talking about it. On a personal level, it frustrates me to no end to see our players facing issues while playing the game.

But I could not have been more proud of our response. We didn’t run away or hide from the feedback and instead accepted them like a sledgehammer to the face and kept working on pushing updates and fixes. And as a game designer, it’s been an incredibly gratifying experience seeing people have fun with your game. Because that is the core essence of why we make games to begin with- for people to have fun.

If you’re someone who’s not yet bought or played Towers of Aghasba, I can assure you as one of the developers that it is a game worth your time and money. It is a beautiful, unique game that tries something different. It isn’t perfect, but throughout our Early Access period, we will keep improving and updating the game constantly, while being incredibly open with our community. Even if you’re not ready for the game in its current state, I hope you at least choose to follow the game through its Early Access development till it eventually reaches a state where you’d be ready to dive into it.

And if you’re already one of the tens of thousands of players who’ve bought the game and played it- first off, thank you. It means the world for us as indie game developers for players to buy and play our game. Your feedback, both justifiably critical and heartwarmingly positive, plays a massive role in shaping the game to the gem it can be.

Launching Towers of Aghasba into early access has been a journey. Through the chaotic launch and the harrowing redemption arc we’re still undergoing, I genuinely believe it’s made me a better person. It probably aged me by like 15 years, but I’m coming out of it feeling like a seasoned game designer with a lot more faith in myself with the experiences I’ve gained from it.

I hoping to share more of my experiences and knowledge from designing and working on Towers of Aghasba in the coming weeks, so stay tuned for more!