People sometimes ask what indie mobile game development actually looks like. This piece walks through the daily reality of building Lost Tower from inside the studio.
The team
Lost Tower is built by a small team at AWO Gaming Studio, in partnership with Evy Mind for Unity tooling. See our studio page for the team and partnership details.
The workflow
We work in two-week sprints. Each sprint targets a small set of changes: new features, balance adjustments, bug fixes. We ship beta updates monthly to Discord testers, then watch their feedback before committing to the next sprint.
The process is iterative, not waterfall. We have changed direction many times based on what beta data shows.
The tools
Unity for the engine. Evy Mind's tooling for asset and pipeline acceleration. Git for source control. Discord for community. The boring stuff is the necessary stuff.
The deadlines
Internal deadlines are aggressive. External deadlines are flexible. We hold ourselves accountable to weekly progress without committing to launch dates we cannot keep. The cost of a premature launch is much higher than the cost of a delayed launch.
The reality
Small studio life is less glamorous than the romantic version. It involves spreadsheets, meetings, balance discussions, marketing tasks. It also involves moments of insight that make the rest worth it: a system clicks into place, a player message arrives describing exactly the experience we hoped to create, a balance change works.
See our piece on indie mobile game development for the broader perspective.