Interviewer: To start, how long have you been working on News Tower? When did it go from just "doodling" to a real project?
Jan-Maarten: It’s difficult to put an exact date on it because the first spark of the idea was quite a long time ago. Around 2017, I was working alone from home and put together a rough pitch deck and some art to communicate the concept. By the end of 2018, the studio was founded, and we really started in 2019.
At first, I only worked on it one day a week while focusing on another game for Gamious, Turmoil, but it quickly became clear that if we wanted this to work, it had to be my full-time focus. In total, it’s been about six or seven years of development, though not all of it was full-time.
Interviewer: It’s a big "baby" now; it has grown quite a bit, wouldn’t you say?
JM: It’s funny because my daughter was born in August 2018. She doesn’t know a life where I’m not working on News Tower—she’s seven now. It’s a reminder that you can only do so many projects like this in a lifetime when they take seven years. The goal was always to create an "evergreen" tycoon game that we could keep updating for multiple years.
Early concept of the building and layout system
Interviewer: Moving on to the first launch day, the Early Access launch. How did you experience it? Were you confident, or was it a process of trial and error?
JM: I’m an anxious person by nature, so it was scary. We had some confidence because we won the Indigo Prize, but reaching Early Access meant we finally had to deliver a functional game, not just an exciting idea.
We were not sure what to expect, but the numbers were actually quite nice, we hit over 1,150 concurrent users on Steam. People joined the Discord and gave great feedback, which helped a lot. We really wanted, together with the community, to create the best experience. However, we also made mistakes. For example, our Steam Next Fest demo was way too janky, I think we even had a last-minute bug that prevented half the players from getting past the intro. Partnering with Twin Sails Interactive gave us the professional framework to better manage last-minute risks. Now that the game is live, we feel a duty to do right by our players. We’ve shifted our focus toward long-term stability, ensuring things like save compatibility remain seamless, even as the game evolves beyond its more forgiving Early Access time.
Early concept of the building and layout system
Interviewer: Instinctively, what were the best and worst parts of the Early Access phase for you?
JM: The high was definitely the launch, the influx of players, both in game and on Discord was amazing.
The low point came about three-quarters of the way through Early Access. We realized that creating news and quest content required so much manual labor that we couldn't provide everything we promised. I spent two or three months doing nothing but intense work in Excel putting news items together, and because of that I couldn’t help with assets programmers needed. That was really difficult, it felt like it would never end.
We eventually decided to change the roadmap and postpone some features from the 1.0 release. I felt like I was betraying the community, but the workload was just not feasible. On a personal level, it was also tough because my wife was pregnant and I was working nights and weekends out of a sense of ownership.
Complete Roadmap from EA launch until 1.0
Interviewer: People usually don’t realize how long game development needs, especially if you are not a triple A studio. On a human level, how has News Tower changed you?
JM: It taught me to let go. I’m a perfectionist and a control freak, but you can’t maintain that and ever finish a project. I had to learn the mantra: "Make it exist first, and perfect it later".
I also learned that you can't please everyone. Especially in Early Access, it’s often better to show a rough sketch and let people play with it rather than waiting for a "perfect" version. I feel like a much better designer and illustrator now because of the mistakes we made.
Interviewer: And it is important to accept your own limitations, I would rather be great at a couple of things rather than being Ok at all of them. Someone else will balance it out.
JM: Exactly, and that is what I am the proudest of, News Tower really is a team effort. Some of us are better coders, some better illustrators, and we integrated their vision of design too.
Interviewer: Would you say they are your work-family in a sense?
JM: Definitely, most of us don’t have a gaming background. So we had to learn to know each other in order to work better together. Accept each other's skills and annoyances, no-body is perfect, but we grew from this and are a tight team now.
Interviewer: What was the difference between the Early Access launch and the 1.0 launch?
JM: 1.0 was even more scary. As the date approached, that voice in the back of my head started saying, "Maybe everyone who wanted News Tower already bought it in Early Access. It’s going to fail". Even after the launch went well and we saw high player counts, I would hyper-focus on negative comments in the Steam forums.
Interviewer: It’s often hard to maintain perspective because most people enjoying the game are simply playing it, not posting about it. Reading through negative threads can be discouraging, but you have to remember that those voices don't always reflect the experience of the silent majority.
JM: Exactly! My nature is to focus on that and worry that "people are going to find out the game isn't as good as we think it is". But now, that anxiety is being replaced by pride. It feels like our "baby," and we want to make sure it has a long and happy life.
We have a small but awesome team to do just that!
As it is a project dear to us, we really want to keep on updating the game in the months to come with one update here in February, and a really cool announcement later in spring!
Livestream of the dev team for the 1.0 launch
Bonus picture: Part of the team did a small trip to New York to receive the Best Hidden Gem New York Game Awards!