Architower

boy oh boy have i been dying to finally play this. the game looks like grow your roots gameplaywise which has me excited. after playing a bit, i can confirm my theory to be true. the music and sounds are amazing and the game looks so nice. the game also guides you pretty well, explaining mechanics and letting you play around for a bit before introducing more

jam version:

a bit of confusion i had was with structure placing rules.  platforms  can just be placed on a free space on top of a foundation. gardens can only be placed fully on foundations, but can share a space with other structures. homes are a bit weirder. they need to be placed on foundations, with at max one space not on a foundation. that condition is a bit unclear, but can be figured out. research has the same conditions as homes, and farms can have two hanging spaces. commerce has home conditions, entertainment has farm conditions, bridge has platform conditions

onto the buildings themselves: there are different versions of most structures that are selected at random. idk how to feel about it. on the one hand it forces a diverse structure and makes every placement require different conditions, but on the other hand, since this is random and there is  no way to destroy structures, your agency in building the tower is limited by random chance. then again i am more fond of the randomness. education and entertainment not having versions was a bit disappointing, but bridges i was happy about them being consistent. i think i like different looks, i dont like the differing space occupation..

also there is the one 4x4 home that is two homes, where  the roof isnt a full foundation, but instead  -_--, making it super annoying to place a home on top due to the overhang condition. other home variants share a similar problem and make stacking cleanly nearly impossible, making towering somewhat annoying for a game called architower.

the resources were a bit weird: swirls have a cap, and are generated over time. food is only generated for placing a building, making it much more tedious to collect. this leads to me having to make a bunch of gardens for little food, to be able to build. farms dont help either. education costs 10 food and makes 5 research. a farm costs 3 research and makes 10 food. so for placing education and a farm you get 6,6 food. using them for food is a bigger hassle than placing gardens, a structure that doesnt interfere with other structures or obstruct construction. 1 food every 10 seconds would have been way better. candy has the same problem as food, but sun is way better. you can get vases for upfront suns or entertainment for passive gain. the monument also generates swirls, food, research and candy passively. why it generates swirls idk, seems kinda redundant to me, but the rest is a godsend.  i still think the farm should have worked like entertainment, but at least there is a way to generate food passively. research being passive through the monument is also much needed to make overhangs actually mass useable. 

the only issue is...monument is the end of the game. the biggest resource help is only useful postgame. since this game is great however and i plan on building more it is a nice help.

also the zoom on the game is insane. postgame the boundary is removed, and i was able to scroll for minutes, having my entire, massive structure be reduced to pixels. 

then i wanted to build under the water using the overhang, and this time, ulike lay down your roots, it let me.. well kinda. the game crashed when i tried. weirdly the overhang going underwater wasnt a problem, i think it was placing a structure on the overhang underwater that was the problem, but it was hard to tell if i was able to place a structure as the water is in the foreground.

and then i find that the game doesnt save.  also i can not for the life of me find the screenshots. i would love to share as i have made some interesting towers, but i cant find them.

fun fact: there is no way to build off of a monument. so say someone were to encase their entire tower in monuments they would be softlocked... so anyways i started a new playthrough, speedran the game and encased my entire tower in about 16 monuments softlocking myself. there is no way to break out( well technically you can crash the game, as i did a sloppy job and wasnt able to cover all places where you can place overhangs underwater) but that is about as good of an escape as closing the game. smh cant believe such an easy to encounter and obvious softlock is possible. 0/10 would not recommend. broken game. lets hope the postjam version fixes this critical oversight that i encountered after about 2 hours of deliberately building a tower in such a way as to softlock myself.

postjam version: 

now it seems to be pretty much the same as the jam version, just with some qol and rebalancing.

looking through the devlog i am not happy. entertainment being passive sun was great. making it farm 2.0 doesnt sound good. do you know how many times i built a farm? once. then i thought about it and came to the conclusion that it wasnt worth it.

playing the game, its not too bad. entertainment is definitely not farm 2.0. it is useable. in fact its in my opinion still better to use than vases, its just worse than in the jam version. a nerf to production rate would have had the same effect, while making it less annoying to use. additionally monument was changed slightly. monument now also costs 10 research and candy, but also now produces 1 sun per second. i like the price changes to make it more costly, but the sun generation is just literally giving back, what was stripped from entertainment, making monument the best building and only building other than home to give passive resources...BUT IT IS THE FINAL BUILDING. like why does the final building have to be the one that would help the most during gameplay. why not do as in lay down your roots. there the fruits didnt give anything in return, but the base tools were better. the game feels like it really wants to force manual gathering instead of building increasing resource income.

my suggestion: give us passive income buildings for all items. farm should be passive food, research should get a new building with passive income, candy should get a new building with passive income and entertainment should stay passive sun. the monument can then either give combined income or nothing at all. my favorite part of the game was building. my least favorite was spamming gardens to afford homes. at first i placed them orderly. in the end i just spam clicked them where i could. it wasnt fun to do, but there is no other way. the game only really starts being fun after placing a monument. once resources become less of a focus you can finally use bridges and overhangs, for which you dont have the resources before. research and candy are super tedious to get without a monument, yet bridges and overhangs are something you want to use lots of, as they are platform variants. imagine having to manually work for every platform. after monument i start only using bridges, as they are consistent. not having passive candy would make building so unfun. so why is the fun reserved for postgame? its hard to feel like you are making progress, if you still need to plant a garden for every food you need. 

lay down your roots had the game balanced perfectly. even with passive resources you had to keep up production on both, but your overall gathering was always increasing. here you only increase your swirl gain. nothing else gets faster or easier till the monument. food is just as hard to get when building homes as it is to get when building the monument. building the first house is just as hard as the 30th. there is no progress. not until you get the monument. then resources become trivial as you gain everything passively. its nice for postgame building, but sucks progression wise. you go from zero income in all resources but swirls to more income than you know what to do with. there is no climb. this is what progression looks like: _____|       

thats how the game feels. you see no progress till its over. yeah you unlock new resources and buildings, but everything is just as hard to get from start to end.

also the underwater building crash is still there and monuments can still softlock. 

now overall i will say i prefer the jam version. i wanted more buildings with passive income, not less. the post jam version has some small qol updates, but a significantly worse gameplay experience due to the tedium of getting a monument being increase with the entertainment nerf. the only reason i rush monument ever time i played both versions was for the passive income as that allows you to actually build what you want. making it more vital by removing entertainments passive sun gain and giving it to monument made me rush monument even harder. the only way to stop manually grinding for resources now is to build a monument. this game iasnt about resource grinding, its mostly about building. i spent most of my time postgame, as thats when you finally get to build. in lay down your roots i would overshoot production and capacity way past fruit, as there was no need to get it and building was more fun than reaching the end. i would forget about the objective and just build. here my only focus is building a monument as soon as possible, as then i can finally start building. when you can only start playing the game after beating it, something has gone wrong.

but all in all i enjoyed the game. progression was my biggest gripe, but building made up for it. the art and music allowed me to get lost in the game and spend way longer building than expected. structure randomness was a bit annoying with it changing the amount of squares they occupy, making platforms and overhangs annoying to use due to the rng nature of how they will behave. its the main reason i rarely used overhangs and instantly switched from platforms to bridges whenever i could. homes also have some annoying versions that make stacking impossible on their own, requiring bridges between layers. despite my mountain of text, a big chunk of it being criticisms, especially for the postjam version, i really enjoyed this game. there is so much fun to be had. i have spent the entire day playing this and enjoying my time. its not perfect and i can think of some improvements, but the building was amazing. i have made some great creations that i would love to share. so please, where do i find the screenshots? i have searched my entire pc to no avail. i cant find anything. like i can even find the crashlogs, which save straight to the game folder, but i cant find the screenshots.  :(

Managed to crash the game! You can buid under the water line using the overhang structure and  a building on top of it.

Give me the ability to save my game, *maybe* add a few more buildings variants (so that when you place three Farms next to each other for example they don't look all the same), and I'm a happy man.