u/awogaming_team

Not a vague "you weren't strong enough." The specific moment where you see the wave coming, you see your build, and you know. That clarity is rare and it's the whole reason the genre works when it works.

Most games hide the reason tbh. Makes you feel like the system is the problem rather than the decision you made three upgrades ago.

Agree or completely wrong?

Not asking what annoys you. The opposite. The mechanic that works so well it should probably be regulated.

For me it's the offline resource return. You open the app after a few hours and there's a pile of things waiting for you. Takes three seconds. Closes the app. Opens it again immediately.

Yours?

The one who goes full offense from minute one and doesn't understand why they're struggling at wave 60. Blames the game. The game is fine.

The one who spends 20 minutes on the upgrade screen before a wave starts. Has a spreadsheet open on a second screen. Is having the time of their life.

The one who reads every single tooltip, understands the system better than anyone, and then picks the weirdest possible build just to see what happens. Usually has the best stories.

The one who loses three times in a row, goes quiet, and comes back two hours later with a build nobody has seen before. Says nothing. Just wins.

Which one are you ?

(And be honest because everyone in your life already knows the answer.)

It's not the pay wall. Not the forced ad. Not even the bad update.

It's the moment you open the game and realize you don't have a decision to make.

You just have a button to press. And you press it. And nothing interesting happens. And you close it. And you never open it again.

You didn't even notice it was the last time.

The games that keep people are the ones that always leave something unresolved. A build you haven't tried. A wave you haven't beaten. A question you're still turning over.

What was the last mobile game that actually kept you coming back and what was the thing it kept leaving unresolved?

Genuine question.

We're getting closer to having something playable and we need real people, not friends or family who will tell us it's great no matter what.

The kind of tester we're looking for is someone who plays idle games or tower defense on mobile, who has actual opinions, and who isn't afraid to say "this part doesn't work for me tbh."

No download link yet. Not ready for that. Just trying to understand if there's interest here before we open anything up.

If that sounds like you, drop a comment !

What kind of mobile games do you play and what usually makes you quit one after a week?

We get asked sometimes why we built four gods instead of one unified power system.

The honest answer is that the tension between them is the point.

War acts before it thinks. Ice thinks before it acts. Time sees things the others don't and rarely shares what it sees. Life exists because everything else risks ending and it doesn't fully belong to the same conversation as the other three.

None of them are wrong. None of them are right. They're all present at the same tower for reasons that aren't entirely aligned, and that disagreement is built directly into how the strategy works.

A pure War build plateaus. Not because War is weak, but because War alone doesn't account for what War doesn't see. The same is true for the others.

The builds that go furthest are the ones that understand what each god is bad at, not just what each god is good at.

More lore coming soon. There's a reason these four ended up at the same place.

Not your favourite right now. The first one that made you understand what the genre was really about.

For a lot of people it's Kingdom Rush. For others it's Bloons, or Plants vs Zombies back in the day, or something more obscure that nobody else mentions.

Asking because we're deep into building Lost Tower and we still think about the games that shaped how we see tower defense. The ones that proved the genre could have real depth instead of just wave after wave of the same thing.

Curious what yours was ?!

The reputation is earned. Most F2P is built around extraction, not experience. But I don't think the model itself is the problem -> I think most studios using it have the wrong priorities.

What would actually make you trust a free game? Not in theory, what has a game actually done that made you think "okay, this one is different"?

(Part of a team building a free to play mobile game right now, so this is something I think about genuinely and not theoretically.)

Genuinely asking because I'm working on one right now and "respect the player's time" is something we keep coming back to internally as a design principle. Easy to say, harder to actually build around tbh.

I'm curious what that looks like from the player side. Not the best game you've ever played... just one that felt like it wasn't trying to manipulate you.

Early in development we had a version with an energy system. Standard mobile stuff; you play, you run out, you wait or you pay.

We cut it. Not because it's morally wrong or whatever, just because it made the game worse. The idle loop we built doesn't work if you're rationing sessions. The whole point is that you come back when you want to, not when a timer tells you to.

The no forced-ads decision came from the same place. We wanted to build something we'd actually want to play ourselves daily. That's a weird constraint to put on a free mobile game but it's the one we kept coming back to.

Whether that's sustainable long term is a real question we don't have a perfect answer to yet. But it felt like the right call for the kind of game Lost Tower is trying to be.

I've been trying to articulate this clearly and I think I finally have it tbh !

The games that feel condescending are the ones where every upgrade is clearly correct. There's a most-efficient path and it's either obvious or available on a wiki in ten minutes. Your choices don't have real consequences because the system is shallow enough that all roads lead to approximately the same outcome.

The games that respect you are the ones where the upgrade decision has a genuine opportunity cost. Choosing X over Y changes your run in ways that are legible in hindsight but genuinely uncertain in the moment.

Most of the games I respect in this genre; Realm Grinder, Antimatter Dimensions, Melvor Idle at its best, have this property. There are real builds, real tradeoffs, real reasons why a Time+Ice combination plays differently from a War+Life combination.

I've been watching a mobile game in development called Lost Tower that's trying to bring this to mobile tower defense with a strong lore and nice game design. Their parchment system (rare upgrades that change ability logic rather than just adding stats) sounds like exactly this design intention. Pre-launch, so unverified.

What games in your experience best exemplify upgrades that actually matter?

One of those questions where the answer is obviously "it depends" but I want the real answer tbh, not the safe answer.

We've been sitting on a build of our mobile game that is playable with very nice game design/lore, has the core loop working, and would generate useful feedback. But the presentation layer isn't finished, some screens are placeholder, and certain mechanics don't have their full visual feedback/review yet.

The instinct is to wait until it looks 100% right. But every week we wait is a week we're not finding out whether the core design actually works.

I keep coming back to the idea that what external testers are evaluating isn't the polish, it's the design. And the design is as ready as it's going to get without external feedback.

We're building the Lost Tower, mobile tower defense, god power system, idle mechanics. Still pre-beta. I think we're at the point where the right answer is to open it up to a small group and accept the discomfort of showing something unfinished.

How did you know when the time was right?