Oct 27

Tower Lab - playtugstudio

Thank you all so much for participating in our very first community playtest! We are genuinely blown away by the response. The amount of time you all put into writing up feedback, reporting bugs, and sharing your experiences with us has been incredible, and we couldn't be more grateful for this community's support and enthusiasm. Seriously, you're awesome.

So... What's next?

Our goal is to release our official Steam demo early in 2026. In the meantime, we're excited to start implementing more community concepts and will be running additional community playtests to gather feedback on new content.

For Community Playtest 2, we'll be focusing on expanding the game in several key areas:

♾️ Endless Mode

To really lean further into the roguelike nature of the game, we want to add an endless mode which spawns increasingly difficult waves of enemies, testing your defenses to their absolute limit. This mode will come with a leaderboard, allowing you to compete to discover the most powerful synergies.

🧲 New enemies

We want to add more units with distinct strengths and weaknesses. One of our first tests will be metallic enemy types, such as significantly heavier units that can be pushed or pulled by magnetic towers, or copper enemies that force Tesla towers to target them before other units.

🗼 New towers

We want to encourage creative contraptions as a core part of the game. To do that, we want to add new basic towers that focus on creating more meaningful interactions between towers. Instead of just adding more explosions, we want to keep expanding on the physics properties in the game. The first set of towers we're testing will relate to the magnetic enemies mentioned above.

🧰 New modules

The playtest module pool was incredibly limited and will be expanded. Ultimately, we want the module pool to feel rich and diverse, leading to more truly unique strategies.

🪙 Shop redesign

We'll be updating the shop with added features like shop cycling and card removal to provide more opportunities to target specific strategies (especially important as we add more content).

⚖️ Game balance

You all did a phenomenal job exploring the available strategies in the game. One of our core goals with Tower Lab is to encourage combining towers by exploiting physics to really amplify their power. With the limited content in this playtest (and even more limited interactions), we haven't been able to fully test the deeper gameplay here yet. We want to make it so just putting a bunch of towers down facing the level won't be powerful enough to climb the leaderboard - the real power should come from creative combinations.

🛠️ Bug fixes and core design improvements

We'll be working through many of the issues you have helped us identify, primarily:

Enemies getting stuck on roofs/towers with no way down
Enemies being able to sneak past towers due to limitations and a lack of control in the timing system
General UI and aesthetic improvements (we're always iterating on these!)

📅 Future considerations

New building types! We're evaluating adding Traps back into the game - buildings that can be placed on or replace platforms and other new types such as moving towers.
Levels with unique mechanics like pressure plates that activate traps, moving platforms, or outright boss encounters
Procedurally generated levels & map editor

Thank you for being part of this journey from the beginning! ❤️❤️❤️

Oct 27

What We Learned from the Demo (and You!)

Fractured Library - Raguthra Studios

A huge thank you to everyone who played the demo during Next Fest! The demo will remain available to play for free, and I strongly recommend going back in to explore and interact with more things multiple times. No spoilers though.

(and just a quick plug for our Kickstarter here!)

Over 600 of you chose to spend your time in the world we’ve created, and that feels pretty darn special.

As most of you know, the demo is a very early version that was designed to give you a feel for the world, the characters, and the general gameplay of the full game.

We’ve been fortunate enough to have gained a positive rating from your reviews, and would like to take a moment to address the wonderful, constructive feedback we’ve received. Please know that we appreciate it all truly; it helps us make the full game even better.

Your feedback overall was positive, with the general sentiment being that it felt intuitive and rewarding to explore. You noted that the demo was short, and we will be noting that for future demos! The people want MORE.

You LOVED:

The banter between characters
World-building and story immersion
Strong emotional connection with the story

I can confirm that the full game will be jam-packed with much more of your favourite Kayak/Hazel banter and heartwarming moments.

Some issues you helped spot:

Difficulties when interacting with objects, especially using the controller.
Struggles with diagonal movement down the stairs, and the pathways were difficult
Issues with UI visibility when looking at bookshelves.

We’ll be noting all of this for our active development of the full game of Fractured Library, and will be putting the game through much more thorough play-testing before release to catch any new bugs that will inevitably pop up.

Thank you for being here so early in the journey of creating Fractured Library- every review, comment, share, and conversation make it feel all the more special.

If you’d like to help us bring this world to life, our Kickstarter still has 15 days remaining!!

Oct 27

New Halloween Microtransactions

Path of Exile - CommunityTeam_GGG

It's the time of year to spread some seasonal scare, and we've got some new treats to help you trick! Check out the range of new and returning seasonal Halloween microtransactions below, or get yours by pressing M to open the shop in-game.

All of this year's new Halloween microtransactions are available in both Path of Exile 1 and Path of Exile 2. The returning Halloween microtransactions are currently only available in Path of Exile 1, and will be available in Path of Exile 2 at a later date.

New:

Returning:

These microtransactions will be available until 4pm Tuesday, November 11th (PST). They'll then be leaving the store until they return again next Halloween.

Thanks for your support!