🏰👠 The Tower GD Masterclass Review: The ultimate Cinderella story

Discord 50% 50% is discord is 100k people with even now 25k online.

Oh wow, yes, wow, that's that's insane.

Yeah, a lot of organics then.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

So we have uh 60k paid ads and paid search, so it's like it's like 90,000, which is basically 50% of the still goes to show how important UA is, even if you have a Cinderella story.

Like you still need to get the UA rights.

UA is so important.

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We're the two and a half gamers, the midnight crew.

Talking UA adverts and game design too.

Mateish, Felix, Shaku, bringing the insight.

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Hello, hello, and welcome to another fantastic episode of the Two and a Half Gamers podcast, where we dissect games so you can stay two and a half steps ahead of the gaming industry.

Today, we are doing the tower.

I'm Felix Brauberg.

My My name is Mati Lancerich.

This is the kickest version.

And we are your hosts.

We are your hosts.

We are not doing this.

I can see Yagub, like, how did you find this game and put it on the docket?

Because honestly, I really love this game.

This is great.

It's in the menu.

It's on the menu for years.

Yeah, it's been in the sheet for years, been requested requested by like multiple fans, basically.

And we were, I guess, going back and forth of like where to put it because it's not new, really.

And there is also stuff in the news lately.

So, yeah, here we go.

I guess that's how it is.

Here we go.

Yeah, also, we had the

event, GDC, this year, in March, and Anthony came to visit the event and came to me and said, Ben, I really love your podcast.

I'm the guy who actually made the game called The Tower.

It's like, oh, then you need to come on the podcast at some point in the future.

But he's busy, but we also asked a few questions and he was really, you know, amazing that he could answer some of our questions, my additional questions about UA and some other stuff.

So, you know, there are still only four full-time employees.

So it's a very small team,

but a bunch of contractors, obviously.

It's like one of those answers from, what was it, Las More?

Like, oh, we're just 50 people but we have like forty contractors.

I mean come on it makes sense.

It's like this is the smart way of doing things by the way.

Yeah it is the smart way definitely.

There's uh yeah Anthony started hiring three years ago but it's still still for four full-time employees and twenty-five contractors.

So it's a big it's a big amount of control but again smart way how to do it.

Do you want to start with the numbers or do you want to start with the game this time?

I would go with game.

The game looks like numbers right away.

Yeah yeah exactly.

Just scale scale the excel sheet, you're right.

But man it's such an example of a game that just like someone's just like, oh, let me just do something different and it works.

You know, it's it's one of the game.

This is a perfect example where you don't really need any art.

Because that's like this is a perfect example.

Because art is not really like art is not the game.

Game design is the same.

This is like the power of game design.

I think like it's kind of reminiscent of something like BitLife Simulator.

Also like a game like very niche, going very strong after like such a long time and very unique concept.

And there's like nobody can copy it because it's just so d

it's there.

But actually when I was digging into this, I just wanted to show you that there's actually a copy on the market.

There's so many copies of this.

Yeah, but like I mean from a prominent studio.

So

yeah.

So if you remember at some point later there is the tower defense chart.

Well top 10 game in the chart is Galaxy Defense Fortress T D.

Our guys here from the tower are actually not there

because they are not considered by Sensor Tower as a tower defense game, but an idler.

Of course.

Which I guess is true to some degree, but I would definitely put them here.

I can even show you the video where Anthony, I mean, he is the best creative.

Well, he is even the best creative.

And

he's talking about how he made a tower defense game slash an incremental game.

So it would be somewhere there between seven and eight, right?

If it was here on the list um

let me yeah, it would be double just two point one a month, right?

So yeah, yeah, yeah, and that's sadness multiplier on top of that.

So yeah, yeah, two two two plus, let's say.

Yeah, two plus, and I would say it's close to two point five,

yeah.

Let's go with that.

And also we need to, again, like I'm saying this for the 20th time, we need to cut Kingdom Grow out of this list because this is a forex on the tower defense game.

So yeah, but it's in the tower defense.

category,

yeah, somewhere around Grade Rush.

I think Grade Rush makes more because it is much more ads.

So

that's there, yeah.

That's that's also true, yeah, yeah.

Okay, uh, the game I wanted to show is called Geometry Tower, Idol Defense.

I saw this actually before, yeah,

so it kind of looks the same, yeah, it is exactly the same.

Yeah, and this is from

Cyber Mission Games, and what is Cyber Joy Games?

It's the guys that did the Galactic Defense fans fortress TD.

Yes.

So they are also in the chart on 10 Spot.

We covered their game.

It's the Bang Bang Survivor sci-fi niche version.

So we'll see.

But yeah, it's there.

Anyway, back to the game.

So as I said, it's one of those

going strong forever and reaching record revenue pretty much forever because it just started so low and didn't really scale that big.

So low.

Yeah, but that's like literally how it is.

Like started like

August 2021.

Started from the bottom lamp.

We are here.

There you go.

From zero to hero, literally.

So it goes to something like 6k, 7k a day, and then it went all the way to something like 80k a day.

Now jumping with these bikes.

Those are, I think, events.

Remember, four full-time employees.

Yeah.

Four-time, like four full-time employees.

That's all it is.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

But that's like amazing.

Like, that's why we're covering this story because it's just literally

very interesting.

And especially the game design and whatever they did there, it's quite unique.

So, as I said, like, let's look at the numbers.

This is the game, it's the numbers.

Yes, they don't really do the thing.

How I would do this episode is that let me go over the feature set and gameplay, and why I played the gameplay and show you how to do the tactics Matic and read us some of the answers from Anthony himself, actually.

Because, yeah, we asked the guys, they couldn't come, unfortunately, but they still were able to at least give us some hints.

Because again, it's really fun check our bullshit

if we do some.

So this is no bullshit gaming podcast, by the way.

So we are let's go.

So you start within the game on tier one.

It has actually difficulty tiers that you select yourself.

This is, by the way, one of those things that does like why this game is so core because you select a lot of stuff yourself and just from the beginning there are so many decisions that you need to do yourself, which means there's a giant margin of error.

And if you screw up, you know, you kind of didn't really work out.

So,

by the way, any comments to the highest wave?

Yeah, like when I was playing it, I didn't progress for like two days because I wasn't playing the method that you sent

wave.

Yeah, and then like when you start pressing the right, like playing the right way, you're like, oh,

okay.

Like, how would I have known that?

And then, like, you actually have to go on these boards.

And then, like, it's not as fun playing when you're playing that way because you're just upping on defense the whole time.

Yeah, yeah.

But it's just like the first tier, like early beginner guide.

Yeah, because then you need to change the build multiple times when you

this build won't work that well in tier two.

Okay, yeah, yeah.

That's the that's the Jakob's efficient way.

I was trying to play the fun way, and I just ended up playing.

Yeah, I was playing fun way, and I was not progressing.

Yeah, wait,

hmm, okay.

And I kept losing, and I was like, oh, god, damn it, I have to play Jakob's way.

Exactly.

I was like, we need like now, we need to actually follow the guides.

Yeah.

This is the game where you follow the guys from the beginning it just like yeah so anyway so this is the main menu after a while you unlock some of these things here in the milestones milestone is like the main feature unlock where we have like the lab to have events to have tournaments somewhere i don't know where i think like quite here yeah from wave 60 and then it goes all the way to something like wave 4000

where you get like T1 fluxes I think like artifacts or not like a lot of progression layers basically so that's there so the first progression layer are these attack upgrades those are exactly the ones that you have in the main core but these you can re-buy so you can start from a better point so basically if i like you see here i have here defense absolute already cost you like 2.2k coins because it's like 48 usually like normal one will be like five or something so that's there then you have utility upgrades like these three main categories and then the special which is ultimate weapons which cost a shit ton of money

Which are some like very special abilities, like chrono field that I have here, which like slows speed of the enemies, and then you have like

that's literally like atomic bombs or whatever, like stuff like that.

So, very, very these are like the chase items.

And again, you see that they have a lot of upgrade layers because not only I need to first like get a lot of these like special currency for those, but I need to invest in those to kind of mean something because, like, for instance, in this current basic state, this literally does nothing.

Like, it just slows time for five seconds every three minutes like really

doesn't work that well then there's the gacha which is just normal shard gacha that's it the interesting part is that you unlock actually the deck slots in it so deck slot costs hard currency which it's expensive yeah

expensive so that's great the cards are just normal ones like you upgrade those and they just scale up as you have more levels of them some are completely useless like we talk about in the first iteration of the build and then some are very good.

So for instance, this one, the enemy balance, which increases cash earned, like, yeah, that's great.

Because basically the point of this game is that either you play for pushing tiers, like pushing the waves as high as possible, like you invest everything into like the proper build, or you do like the grindy build, you like just farm money.

This is like the build just to get like the most money out of it.

That's it.

Because when you're farming the soft currency, which we take out of the game, I mean the core gameplay.

This feature I didn't unlock because tier 2 wave 90 is like, oof.

Yeah, that's very hard.

Oof, it'll take you half a year.

Not half a year.

It would take me like a month, probably.

Like, just like, I need to just grind

stuff.

Because, like, tier two already scales so fast.

Like, my turtle leg just can't keep up because it's just like everything scales so fast.

Can you show a video of what the last unlockable looks like, though?

I guess we can find it.

Yeah, no worries.

You can find it for sure.

Lab, this is basically just a research tree, nothing really to it.

So you select some researches and you kind of research it out.

You can rush it and skip the timer that's it like bread and butter stuff not really then there's the shop interestingly gardening the shop a lot of these things are permanent which are very very good conversion items such as all coins earned permanently times two or times three or disabling ads or some packs basically there's an offer wall hidden here and then like yeah very very basic shop i don't think so they even have offers here

my disable ads costs 9.99 by the way your disable ads cost 9.99 my disabled ads cost 10.99 euros you have dollars price there or what do you have there oh it's euros i

have one euro less i have no idea

okay have you spent the game already wait a second i did but it doesn't matter if you scroll up there's one interesting thing which i don't think you have can you see the the top web store web store wow and you know what and you know what by the way this is an interesting thing because they use fast spring and this is not an ambush ad but they do it they use

our sponsors FastSpring.

This is the true story ad exactly.

So, dear listeners, if you want to just use the web store, you have your web store, just go to the fastspring.gg.

There you go.

We are actually, this is finally the case.

We are actually reviewing game and they have Fast Spring as a web store.

So, thank you very much, guys, from Fastpring to sponsoring the episode.

And also to kind of help other developers to earn more money in the US.

I might have the web store because I'm in the US at the moment.

Do you think that's that's the case or you you're still in slovakian uh yeah country that is

right upstairs that is true yeah that is true you have iow i do seem to have it felix yeah yeah i don't have it no yeah okay that's interesting i don't know maybe just some segmentation might be i because you paid can you pay felix no i haven't paid but i say i i said it i s I saw it before actually making a purchase.

Yes.

So I was like, oh, wait a sec, I want to make a purchase.

So I went to the web store and then it's like, oh, wait a second, this Flash Print Web Store.

Amazing.

Then I made the purchase and then add

came back to the game and then got all the like freebies afterwards.

Okay, interesting.

Yes, very interesting.

But that's there.

Let's see the game.

Let's see the loop.

Just the final thing here.

Guilds unlock on tier 3, which I guess is the standard feature.

Then there's this whole event thing, which is there again, main bread and butter, I guessing, because lots of quests here that you need to do, and there's lots of prizes.

Especially, it's just basic like event shop kind of setup where you farm and then you choose what you want to buy.

Skins increase your currency gain permanently if you have those.

They're limited, so that's very, very powerful.

And then there's the daily missions thing, which just you know go and recharge.

They already have like a weekly rotation, it's not really daily, just like you daily complete eight missions, and then you go in and like do these other things there.

Yeah, and there's also an ad for five gems.

I'll go over all the placements.

Yeah, yeah, you'll go over those when you're done.

Anyway, let's go.

We'll go tier one.

I'll use my turtle build to kind of show you how it goes and that way we literally will be able to play for an hour.

So, uh, here is the game.

Uh, first thing, immediately, what you would do, you would go here and do the bonus ad because it's just like one point times call multiplier for twenty minutes.

A no-brainer.

Yeah, and you stack these for like hours and then just go and watch like seven ads in a row.

That's it.

That's the first one.

Uh, then, what you do, you immediately go here and just get all the cash, kind of increase your cash bonuses.

I have the skip waves thing, so I'm already on wave 10, as you see.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

There's the skip intro, speed up the stuff.

Also, I researched like 3.5 game speed, which is like one of the best upgrades here.

Yes, you can get because it's just like you know, you go faster.

Uh, then you see the whole point of this, like, turtle build or whatnot is that enemies have like this kind of a damage, like 14.7 something.

If we go to our defenses, we have currently defense, like absolute, meaning like the real defense, like 48, which means they do jack shit.

As you say,

they just like more there.

And what we do, we also don't really like you, we don't invest in attack upgrades at all.

Zero, zero attack upgrade.

You're describing builds now.

Can you just describe how the game works?

The best builds?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Because

we said you were right, but yeah.

Yeah, people usually don't get that until this point.

I mean, yeah,

so what you do, like, you know, your channel automatically kills kills enemies, and you just

put in these upgrades and help your tower kill them better.

Like, you know, three main upgrade vectors, and the last one is the ultimate weapons.

As we told before, this unlocked somewhere there later.

We can turn and off or on or whatever.

But we already had this game because this is a similar, like this kind of type of game.

It's a similar game from what was it, the Azure one from the Chinese team, if you remember, Castle something.

I forgot

Castle Siege, something, something where it was actually slime.

Yeah, slime castle.

Slime castle.

Yeah, where the enemies were coming in waves from the right, and you were just upgrading the

damage of your towers to everything.

This is very similar.

It's just this is a circle of defense.

Enemies are coming from all the way here.

You can also do this, like make it nice on the full screen, basically.

Stuff like that.

And that's the beauty of it.

That if you really play it, like the run of this kind of one game can take very, very long.

I mean, hours, like literally hours.

And we're still like on escape because you've seen like how many ways this is.

I think like we go over thousands and everything.

And there's like lots of mechanisms to kind of make it seem like you're playing an idler, basically.

Like you have like, for instance, interest.

Like you see, I have this thing, which you have, if you click here, it's like I make 5k per minute, 200 coins per minute, and stuff.

So you see a lot of idle mechanics in it.

as for like making money like like the the menu here on the bottom literally looks like adventure capitalist it's just like you increase stuff then it increases in price therefore you just cannot like you know if you just sell it like that's all my money basically and then I need to wait basically so that's there very interestingly and yeah here we go both to jams very interestingly one thing that I really haven't seen anywhere is that you can actually interact with like rest of the game during the war because it's an idle game so if you go here you can still watch your upgrades you know let me put another one here another research here you can go and even summon new cards.

You can go and complete missions here, like you would be in the main menu.

That's like super unique, but you're all doing this during the run.

So that's really nice because I guess at some point somebody figured out like these runs take hours and like I need to, you know, set up new lab research or whatever, buy something, complete mission.

So it's very, very handy.

And what's happening here, as you see here, the enemies are slowly kind of getting stronger and stronger.

We are getting more and more money, and then we start finally upgrading our defenses.

Which you see that suddenly we're just like 10 times more or whatever.

Plus, there's also defense like percentages, like lower dairy attack.

And there's the main thing why we killed them so fast, which is thorns damage because they just go here and kill themselves by four seconds currently.

And we can push it to three seconds now.

That's it.

And this whole thing just goes in and scales.

And my last level record that I pushed here regarding the waste was 513.

And this one takes 13.

This whole thing takes like an hour plus on speed three and a half.

Yeah, and you see where this whole point now comes from, like the fun and like whatnot from optimization, from you being efficient, following all of these guys, different tactics, strategy.

Again, this is just the turtle build, as we call it, like the community calls it, because it's from the beginning of the game.

Because the enemies are very, very easy in this first sense, even though Felix and Matte were horribly dying by using the attack

because they can exactly because of the speed and then damage it's like exactly yeah there's also no onboarding like yeah there's no like these games zero onboarding yeah i was i was playing this i think a couple of months ago and i said look we need to definitely start talking about this on the podcast and i was like i couldn't even pass the like third wave because i was clicking on the on the attack on the name name of no i was clicking on the name of like the attack speed i was like what the fuck is why i'm not upgrading it yeah it is this basically.

This happened.

Then I was like,

And then I was like, Oh, wait a second, I need to click on the right.

Yeah, there.

Oh, okay.

Now I got it.

No, but I was, I was, yeah, I was speeding up.

I mean, because eventually it just doesn't work so well because it scales damage by the HP of enemies.

You see, like, I'm doing currently, like, what, like, 130 damage, like this guy, and my real damage is like 44 because the horse damage just scales percentage wise, so you can scale it infinitely, basically.

Also, but then, like, this game is really core.

That's why,

you know we see the revenue go up go go up, but not the like the scale of the of the UA that much, because I'm pretty sure like the CPS of this this game is just like absolutely

amazingly high.

Yeah, because the thing is and this is really the important part because as I was uh digging into this more and more,

like you see all those like build ideas where where we are.

Like uh for instance this one where it is I don't know if I can find like uh this is some advanced guide whatever bullshit, but there's a lot of a lot of those those guides, yeah.

So, for instance, this one here, you see

there's he's got a star instead of a tower, yeah, yeah, of course, because that's the skin.

But but just by the sheer stuff that you see here, that's happening here, that the guy has like 84% critical chance, which is max, you see like how many different things is like one 150 million HP plus the shield plus like completely new mechanics unlock later and like you can optimize it to the limit literally by having these other things there that are just like yeah like this coin thing yeah but the attack speed is max yeah yeah

so eventually like you see how like this whole thing turns into this like disco show because there's like so many new mechanics being unlocked like it's the same as like the hubby you know survivor io stuff where like the character turns into blender basically because like there's so many weapons, great way of describing it.

That's like pretty much it.

And like here, we are just at the basic stage of the game, even though it's like could be like wave 500 or whatever.

But eventually there will be like so many more mechanics because if I, as I said, if I go tier two, enemies scale much more faster, and like I'll get killed kinda fast because I just don't have the upgrades for

that.

So that's there.

Okay.

Should we do ads?

Yeah, let's do ads and then Matty can read a little bit of the answers from Anthony.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Alright, maybe we should do that now, huh?

Or should I do the ads first?

Yeah, let's do ads.

Let's do ads first.

Yeah, let's do ads, just fine.

It's something,

right?

So it's five gems that you see during the runs and also during the main menu.

It pops out, I think, on a 20 or 30 minute timer if you watch it, and then it comes back a bit later.

Then there's the 15 gems in the store on a four-hour cooldown.

And then it's the yeah, once a day.

That was once a day.

and then it's the coin bonus that stacks right and that's it but then it also has an offer wall and games like this that have a lot of IAP it makes complete sense to have an offer wall there's a lot of people that don't like if you have a strong economy this is the time when you should actually have an offer wall if you go into the store you can see it's right next to the ad placement

if you scroll down yeah right there you can just go in yeah yeah makes complete sense especially now uh offer walls are going crazy uh competing so if you have a game with a solid economy and a lot of IAPs, you can get paid a big signing bonus if you have a big user base.

So these guys are using Tapjoy, and I think they're on Iron Source mediation because there's a lot of Iron Source, a lot of Unity ads.

Could be.

My little like thing here, if you go back to the store, right?

The actual store, not this one, if you go to the remove ads offer, this is kind of my first pickle to pick, right?

This is super generous.

Being all rewarded ads forever

yeah for like 10 euros or 11 or 10 euros depending on if you're matte or not yeah I've worked on games where this really comes and bites you right like I would have put this more on a like yeah

30 days or 15 days right because this is too generous you're giving way too much away here and it doesn't give you

yeah exactly for ad like even you could even do some sort of uh skip it's here but this is too generous in terms of removing ads I'm sure it might even be the top IAP, right?

If you go to CenterTap, we might be able to check that.

I don't think I don't think this is top IIP at all.

I mean, what do you think, like, how what's the was the actual split?

Event boost.

See?

Yeah, it's the one because

yeah, but look, a third one is ads, right?

Third one, yes.

But then, like, how mu like what's the split uh ads versus IIPs in this case?

Okay, yeah.

So basically, I don't know how many people watch these ads, but I'm estimating 45% ad viewer rate rate and six rewarded ads per day, which would mean on the 113k user base, it's about 8K per day or 9.

So that's 10%, but then offer wall is usually 10% as well.

Ad revenue here is 20%.

Offer wall usually go up to 10%, yeah.

There's a lot of people who watch it.

You gotta remember, ECPMs for offer walls in the States is like $600 for offer wall.

I wanted to say, like, you are

very good at what you do, but don't yeah, don't continue after that 10%.

Yeah, don't continue after that 10%.

Like, let's end there.

Let's end there.

Okay, but, okay, so here's the thing, right?

Like, if I were to add new ad placements, I'd probably do some sort of pre-match boosters of stats or something like that, but something before you do a run or give you an option to do it.

But it's like, it kind of interrupts the game flow.

But the biggest pet peeve I have here is their adapts.txt file.

If they added more networks, if they added more networks, they would probably increase revenues by 50 or 60% because they only have Unity.

Yeah,

they only have Unity and Google.

Sure, if you're a four-person team, that's fine.

But like every day, you're losing like two to three K by not having App Love and by not having Meta by like none of the major net networks, right?

So I understand they're four people, but it's been live now for three years.

Like

four.

That's a lot of money you've wasted basically by not having those extra networks, right?

Yeah, it's like fifty percent of the US.

Yeah, it's majority US.

Yeah, yeah, should be pretty good money.

Yeah, I mean, like, honestly,

easy things, easy fix, yeah, exactly.

More competition, more money, yeah, yeah, all right.

I rest my case, yeah, yeah, no, no, I think, like, uh, uh, Anthony mentioned it's 10%, but uh,

we don't I didn't take into consideration the sadness multiplier, so so we I think it, you know, it can be more than like 10k per day or 8k per day in terms of the ads.

Nice X or 4 or 5 K a day if you just add all these networks, it makes a massive difference.

Like, if you only have Google and Iron Source, that's not good.

I mean, Unity, yeah, that's true.

Let me upgrade some stuff and try to push tier two while you can read the questions in the meeting.

Yeah, of course,

I can do that.

Because

so,

yeah, put together some questions and we asked Anthony because I mean, he's traveling and having some events and whatnot.

The game itself proves that it's a great game, obviously, not just because of the game design.

Like, what was the inspiration behind the game and how Anthony got the idea of combining tower defense with Idol?

So there is a lot of inspiration that comes from the Idol game portfolio in terms of the large number of upgrades and game economy.

And the core loop of the game is heavily inspired by a web game called The Perfect Tower.

So he felt like having a single tower instead of focusing on tower placements allows the player to spend more time thinking about the macro decisions and less on active gameplay.

It turns game into less of a puzzle game and more of a game about grinding.

That's what everybody loves.

And making a best macro decision to try and progress these days because it's basically like the same as Bang Bang Survivor.

They just revolve the road.

No.

Yeah.

Making the best macro decision to progress your tower.

And starting with that foundation, Anthony spent most of the time focused on making the meta loops and progression systems as deep as possible, which

is really deep, like Mariana Tranquil.

Really deep.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Then there's a lot of inspiration coming from

his other titles for live ops when it comes to the tournaments and event systems.

There's no energy systems and other

play, play, play.

Play, exactly.

Are they based?

Are they US based?

Yeah, so he Anthony is in Austin, and there is

someone in San Francisco and in LA as well.

They're here.

So not focusing on energy system means that

the runs of players enter,

it can be any amount of time that makes sense, right?

So exactly.

Unlimited.

The runs that start off short enough that the energy system would have worked.

But when you need to have enough levels to make it...

make the time short enough to make sense again.

So this is just endless, basically.

Because the nature of the game

would be very hard to balance.

Exactly.

Yeah, yeah.

The waves started exceeding 100 fairly early on, and that point that energy system would be difficult to balance.

So, you know, now it can go for hours.

The game was already performing well enough without the energy system, so he didn't want to restrict the player freedom or just jumping

into a game of just jumping into a game.

So, you can basically play one long session or just a couple of sessions.

Play it on an emulator with the macro is literally the community recommendation.

Yeah, yeah, literally, like I played it like that.

Like, man, you just just like set up.

I have even the macro here somewhere.

Jesus.

Here.

Like, see, the tower.

I just leave it like this, and it just buys absolute defense forever.

And that's it.

Leave it like that for a night.

Amazing.

There you go.

Wave 531.

So then

the UI interactions are very unique.

And Yaku would say nothing if he has seen before.

Yeah,

the major structure and everything, like, you know, the standard of UI, UX, basically

thrown out of the window.

Yeah, I mean, just what is exactly the unit, but if you're referring to this, like the round UI is beginning that you never interact with the world space view.

That's the one.

Yeah, that's true.

And it's simple deciding the upgrades for your tower.

So, you know, that's all the connections there.

And he didn't want any true active gameplay and the gameplay to link towards like more of a like management game, which I guess that's kind of really good connects to the

I built the UI like Excel sheet so you can play with the Excel sheet.

That's pretty exact.

It's a bit like paperclips.

He's reminding me of that.

It's very close to paperclips, actually.

Like very, very close to paperclips.

And then Anthony said the Beatle Defender did a good job of leaning into what essentially is a small number of towers instead of one.

That leans more into the RPG elements.

And it also did a really good job of broadening the audience, which I would assume like that's definitely what Whittle Defender did because of the gameplay and the art style as well because you know yeah it's just much more mainstream this like differentiator yeah this is hexagons against squares I mean hexagons are the best agons right exactly

so and then who is the biggest competitor uh and yeah surprisingly as we discussed like there's not that many clones although there are some but by the time they've already built the massive community and around the game so i mean everybody showed up super late anyway because this is all

the geometry tower clone which has been there from 2024 and it just went nowhere like its biggest scale was like what 8k a day that's it there i guess yeah you can't keep up with the deepness of like how many features and systems these guys already

pushed in into four years so not really yeah it's it's and also like building the community since the very beginning i would say so that's why i mean it's quite quite different.

And

so the Vital Defender kind of comes into mind in terms of the actual competition.

But even though this is a tower defense game, Anthony tends to benchmark it against other management slash Tycoon games.

That's what both of the title.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

So this is definitely more what feels like the game actually is.

Look forward to seeing what the UA creators will look like for this.

I mean,

there's not that many things.

Yeah, we'll get there, but it's not that many things that you can can actually do with this time.

But again, therefore, like you have Anthony as the biggest star of the Karatis, which definitely worked well because I saw it a million times before.

Anyway, so the biggest milestone features for the game that you added through the years.

So when the game released, it was fairly barebone with cards, laps, tournament, and ultimate weapons.

Over time, the large needle movers were like adding bi-weekly events.

The module system, which is...

You see these spikes here.

yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

And the module system, which is more in like an in-depth gacha system, that are basically

missing,

yes, and then guilds, which are still bare bone at the moment, but they're a strong foundation for engagement.

And of course,

nets, basically, yeah, yeah, exactly.

And of course, simply extending the core gameplay and adding layers to existing mechanics like cards mastery system once you've completed the card collection, basically.

That's interesting.

There's a lot of complexity to the game as you get further, so it's tricky to add something new and keep the game complexity manageable.

So he tends to focus on adding layers to the existing systems, like ultimate weapons plus workshop enhancements and stuff.

That's great because like learning and adding a new completely new progression layer, you know, increases the attention budget and the whole complexity formula.

So it's this is the tricky part, like how to design more progression layers without like using much new stuff yeah

and then then there's uh the the last question of from ek was about the kind of the current team size which i already kind of say uh mentioned but the game started with just anthony it's himself one person like he launched the game yeah making it entirely it entirely himself and then after a bit of success he added a dev to to help run it with him for a year or so and now as again as i said fur peop four people at this point devs and like artists come on so Jesus, wow, it's amazing.

Skip's made like over 50 mil.

Like

it's impressive.

Yeah, it's very impressive.

Yeah, so now we have like also product manager and UA in-house as well, by the way.

So

it's interesting.

So, because then I asked, like, what, like, what's the actual like behind like the scale?

Because it's just game updates or creatives or UA or whatever.

Was that?

And it was actually surprise, surprise, mostly about the game updates because increases the engagement LTV over time and now they're making only two or four creatives a month which is very little very little and we know we need to well they know they need to kind of improve this but uh it was basically the scale that's all like pushing the ltv over time increasing the ltv over time because that's what usually dictates the level of of spend you can uh you can well the level of money you can spend but they have yeah the the one hero creative which is anthony in the interview and i will show you that in a scene

so he he told you is 10 ad revenue yeah does that include all things you think or no yeah i think so i think so as well but 10

overall uh you know

with the real numbers can be slightly different from what we see in sensor taber and yeah that's true compared to the revenue context yeah yeah okay so

maybe we can go your way i mean I literally asked, like, how do you feel about being the face of the best performing creative?

He was like, well, I was surprised, but in the retrospective, it makes a lot of sense.

The marketing strategy was focused on connecting with the types of players that would enjoy a game like this with deep mechanics and community.

You know, he gets recognized more often than he expected.

It's actually, because I mean, honestly, like, if you're a dev like this and you make the game alone, like, you will get noticed, but in a very niche community.

I mean, the whole thing is niche.

Exactly.

But, like, it's insane.

It's insane, really.

I love it.

Let's see.

And I actually let's see here.

Are you sharing the screen?

I'm sharing the screen.

Yeah, yeah, I'm going to share it that way.

I'm going to share the screen.

I just need to kind of move a little bit.

Ah, you know what?

I'm just going to share it.

I love these Cinderella stories where it's like solo devs that just like, yeah, knock it out of the park.

It's great.

Look.

So you go.

There you go.

See, those are like all the.

all the things if you scale it up.

Just great, great game design.

Exactly.

That's the whole game.

It's just very, very good.

And excellent balancing.

Excellent balancing.

I look at the Discord community and everything.

So basically, this is the best performing creative.

And this is Anthony.

So, I mean, easy as that, basically.

And

if you remember, I was talking about these types of creatives

in Istanbul

in my presentation, like the dev kind of generated

videos.

Because this is what works, especially in this.

Look, this is your almost your turtle.

Ah, the hundreds of enemies creative.

Yeah, hundreds of enemies.

Looks like fireworks.

Yeah, I mean,

it's like the drones.

This is exactly what you need to do.

All is real, basically.

Nothing's fake.

Yeah,

and I mean, you need to use the

dumb anything into defense, and you win.

Yeah, there you go.

That's your

you need to upgrade the torch.

They're literally telling you the best tactic to help the funnel.

Exactly.

I mean, like, that's that's it.

I would assume like this would work well if it's

called the like Miami

It can turn into that if you change the scenes and shit.

Yeah.

This would work if it's way more if it's 60 second video, by the way.

But you know.

Okay, so this is again.

And I had this, I mean, they're using some of the different things, obviously AI as well, but this is.

This is AI, now.

Yeah, yeah, it is AI, yeah.

But it's not that strong.

I mean, the the latest, you know, see, I mean, if you combine this with what Colm mentioned on the on the podcast before, where uh they do live video or live action videos like people and then combine it with the gameplay and long ones as well.

Turn of creative.

Exact turn of tear of guys.

Yeah,

that's what definitely works because

this feels a little bit like random.

That's definitely random.

Yeah.

So

it's like, I mean, I can see this as a little bit better, but I wanted to show you one face which I will get into.

See,

all of these creatives are short.

And

40 seconds.

40 seconds, then there was 20 seconds, 15 seconds.

I don't know, but I mean,

it feels super random.

So, like, that's that's there, but you have you have Anthony here as a different version, obviously.

And then

again,

good old 3D interviews, which is fine, but this is exactly like Raidrush is doing, which is great.

So, I can I can imagine this works quite well.

Again, 30 seconds only, and then we have

the UGC stuff.

We have also a little bit of AI.

Again, but it's 11 seconds.

So

it's quite short.

Although Anthony mentioned that they're kind of not able to scale up Lavin that much.

So I

immediately said it's because of the creative part and the playables,

which is quite hard to figure out, obviously.

But then we have something like this.

Yeah.

Nice.

Yeah, it's nice.

I mean, again, there are some interesting creatives, but it's not.

I mean, the worst part of this is just you need to use this gameplay, so you don't have so many options.

So you need to be very creative.

I mean, which is fine.

Or crazy, which is

fine as well.

And use a lot of

people.

And then I'm trying to find, I guess it was on the Facebook side of things because their biggest channel is Google, which was surprising for me, but I mean, I don't judge.

Explain for a non-UA person why that's surprising?

Because the top channel is Aplavin, and usually every game that we discuss on this podcast, which is

not based in China, are killing it on Aplavin.

But it might be

pretty good, you expertise on that, don't you?

Yeah, that's true.

That's true, that's true.

I mean, they're running everything in-house at the moment, which is fine, but I'm trying to find this one, which is our.

Like, I wouldn't be surprised if Antony is the one running the campaigns, actually.

The CEO.

No, no, no, he's not.

He's not.

Okay.

They used, no, no, no.

They they used an agency before, and now he's the

internal person.

No, no, no.

The one on the floor.

Yeah, pink.

Yeah, look.

Hello.

That's so random.

Yeah, yeah, I mean,

where's the Japanese?

Where's the guy on the floor?

What happened to that?

Exactly.

That's the guy on the floor.

Oh, wait.

Here.

Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah, so this is

pretty much it.

I'm trying to find our good old friend Jason, who was in this the UGC Jason?

Yeah, the UGC guy.

Yeah,

I saw Jason somewhere here, but I'm not sure where he's

getting at.

Is that June's journey creative?

Yeah, it is.

It is, but I don't think that's it.

I don't think that's

sensitive.

Yeah, yeah, that's correct, but it's okay.

Yeah, these guys wouldn't do it.

Like, the Chinese one would do it.

Yeah.

So, I mean, it's like

multiple different yeah, means are I think okay because it's a very niche community so only niche people will get captured by anyway.

That's true, yeah.

But then do you want the niche people or you want niche?

Yeah, exactly, the niche API.

Well, exactly.

So that's why they have only 7,000

instas per day, right?

But like this is exactly like Felix said.

It's a Cinderella story.

You know, you start to work on your favorite game and you turn it into hobby, then you turn it into job, then you turn it into like, you know, this child success story.

Yeah,

it's still completely like you know, people would laugh at this, like, if it's like you know, compared to some like big games we cover during the year, but in the end, like, what they ever need, like, they have so much money that they don't even care, and so what that's perfect, in my opinion.

Oh, yeah, 100%.

I mean, do you know how much he spends on you?

Like, no, I didn't ask, I didn't want to be too pushy, and I think that's

like this is actually like the they want to have close to their heart, but they're kind of optimizing for like

days which is fairly conservative half of your payments spend

yeah five to six months nowadays yeah like this is literally like the stardue valley of mobile free to play like this is it basically yeah

yeah yeah i guess they get a lot of organics as well then from their community and stuff right oh for sure

kind of man they have i think a lot of their u way is done through the content creators as i was yeah checking the builds and everything even though they you know they don't pay them that hard like Supercell does, but uh they have I think in the game

I think I've seen it yeah can give me the screen for a second so even though they're that small they still have the creator code program nice yeah so I guess they're also using this angle very much because when I was looking at the turtle build guide which like again at some point I was like like let me just google this shit because it's obviously not

how I play it yeah yeah yeah

so of course and I found multitudes of videos multitudes of videos, lots of shit, like you know, similar to something like Ranny, like big pushes and everything.

Not that big because it's not that, you know, mainstream, like just, you know,

say like this, but still, a lot, a lot of creators, a lot of community people kind of doing this.

I'm guessing their discord is super strong.

So, yeah, it's even like here.

There's link for it.

So, yeah, they

it's like it's just the usual playbook for this, like, Cinderella story game.

Like, you try to grow it more to community, through quality, through not, you know, scamming people, through fake ads, whatever so it's like 50 if you go well it's one second smart the paid ads is like 30 at the moment what no no yeah discord like 50 50 discord is 100k people with even now 25k online oh wow yes oh wow that that's insane yeah a lot of organics then yeah yeah yeah so we have uh 60k paid ads and paid search so it's like it's like 90 000 which is basically 50 of the the whole kind of installs still Still goes to show how important UA is, even if you have a Cinderella story.

Like, you still need to get the UA right.

Like, UA is so important.

Of course.

And also,

if you want to scale UA, you can also call PVX Partners.

Hey, if you want to grow your budget without giving away a piece of your company, just go to pvxpartners.com

and get the credit line for marketing, which is the most efficient way to scale your game without getting

additional investment or just getting away a piece of your company.

So pivxpartners.com.

And that's pretty much the Cinderella story we have here.

Anthony, kudos and to the team.

This is insane.

Credit.

This is also 55k.

Oh, nice.

Yeah.

The community is fucking strong.

Yeah, I mean, that is.

And you build it step by step, right?

So this is not like a...

Before we finish, Anthony, where was he working before?

Is he like a self-taught game designer?

I'm not sure.

We can't

gaming.

I don't think so.

This is not the game story you're looking for.

Yeah, I hear that.

I'm just wondering.

Not the Microsoft Harvard dropout.

I'm guessing.

So he's a great game designer, right?

How do you teach yourself this?

It's just really like...

You just dig very deep into the games you like to play because you play them so much.

He was working at Praxer Inc., whatever that is, a chemical manufacturing company, and he was an operation manager for five years.

I'm guessing it was

like, I don't like my job, so I'm going to build this game to kind of switch different jobs.

That's my dream.

Exactly.

I think so.

So he started as a cryogenic control room engineer, then he was a plant engineer, and then operation manager.

And then

he built a game, which is absolutely killing it.

Yeah, yeah.

I think this is also like a very, very strong kind of pushing force for it to work because you don't want

to.

I don't know, but I'm just guessing.

No, like, this is like he, he, he literally like he quit the job started the company and built the game and you know like this is exactly what i was always talking about like it has to work because there's no when did he actually left the job just just so we see the overlap when it was 2017 and immediate well so in 2019 but started the company in 2017 his own like that but the game was 2021 so it's like yeah but this this is like this is not their only

game it's not the first game yeah it's not you don't become a cinderella from the first game

not usually Unless you're Stephen Carvalta and just he gets super lucky.

Anyway, great game, definitely.

One of my next kind of go-to examples of idle game design.

Definitely.

Okay.

I'm trying to find if there is.

Look, because you didn't mention the, you know, like the whole portfolio, obviously.

Yeah.

Yeah, this idle game.

Idol Planet Miners.

Like every second ad.

Yeah, yeah.

I guess it's reloaded or something.

Yes, it doesn't matter.

So there is the additional money on top of this.

And as he mentioned, like the old idle games that are, you know, taking or like from the for all these idle games, it took inspiration, just implemented this idle mechanics into the game.

By the way, that game is also not that small.

Just saying.

The Planet Miner.

Yeah, yeah.

Like it's even older.

Mate,

it's even older, but it's also currently hitting its all-time high.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

20k a day.

Also, I think the ads in this game are way

easier to have good ads or what?

I wouldn't say so, to be honest.

Okay, okay.

Like, if they have the TXT things, as Felix said, like,

yeah, I wouldn't guess.

It's like, seems to me just like Tabor is a better iteration on their learnings from this game.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Not the core, but like systems and stuff.

All right.

Awesome.

Thank you very much, guys, for listening.

Also, again, Natara, Anthony, and all the

team.

All your

but don't forget to add those networks.

Like, unnecessary money to lose.

Yeah, yeah, more creatives, playables, and then you can you can scale even more.

Thank you very much, dear listeners.

Check out the Slack channel, comment under the video because this is very, very important for us as well.

Share it with your industry friends and colleagues, and see you next time.

Bye-bye.