⚙️ Major Infrastructure Update
Today’s update is one of the most important technical upgrades Citywars Tower Defense has ever received.
This patch brings the game onto our latest technology stack and reconnects it with the tools we’ve been building behind the scenes. A lot has changed under the hood, and while not all of it is immediately visible, this update lays the foundation for everything coming next.
📜 What Happened Behind the Scenes
Citywars Tower Defense is built using the same internal tools that we use to create our games. In fact, the game itself is developed directly inside those tools.
Originally, both versions of the game were technically identical. The only difference was that one version had the creation tools hidden while the other exposed them for development.
During a game jam where we wanted to test these tools more actively, we temporarily separated the two versions. One version remained the stable Tower Defense experience, while the other continued evolving with the creation features enabled.
What started as a short-term precaution slowly created a technical split between the two.
As development continued, we kept improving the creation tools and releasing updates on that side every week. With every new change, the gap between the two versions grew a little larger. Over time, merging them back together became more and more complex.
Even though the client version on Steam stayed stable, we continued updating the servers every week, carefully ensuring that the older client could still connect. To make this work, we maintained compatibility patches on the server so the Tower Defense version would continue working without issues.
However, this also meant the Steam client could not easily be updated without bringing everything back together first.
This update finally reunifies everything into a single version again, which means we can once again update the game normally going forward.
It also means that the creation tools we’ve been developing are now available directly inside Citywars Tower Defense, which we’ll talk more about later.
🧩 The Unity Situation
Another challenge happened during this period involving the game engine itself.
In the past, we always kept Citywars Tower Defense updated to the latest Unity version. Staying current helped us benefit from performance improvements, bug fixes, and new engine features.
However, things changed when Unity announced a new pricing model that would charge developers based on game installs and downloads. This decision sparked a massive backlash across the game development community and created a lot of uncertainty around the future of the engine.
At that moment, upgrading the project felt risky. Rather than introducing instability during an already unpredictable situation, we decided to pause Unity upgrades temporarily until things became clearer.
Later on, Unity adjusted their plans, but they also discontinued the subscription tier we were using. That left us with two choices:
• Stay on the old engine version and move to a significantly more expensive license • Or migrate the project to the latest Unity version
Instead of investing in an outdated setup, we chose the long-term solution and upgraded the entire project.
This update finally moves Citywars Tower Defense back onto the latest Unity version (Unity 6), bringing the project back in line with the engine’s current technology.
🧰 Welcome to Cubio (Beta)
You may notice something new in this update: Cubio.
Cubio is the creative platform we've been building behind the scenes, the same toolset we use to create games like Citywars Tower Defense.
With this update, the client now includes access to these creation tools.
If you're curious to explore it, you can create your own project directly from the newly improved start menu:
Start Menu → Project → Create New Project
From there you can begin experimenting with the same systems we use to build our own game experiences.
Cubio deserves its own dedicated announcement (and it will get one soon), but for now we wanted to make the tools available so adventurous players can start experimenting.
We also plan to release detailed tutorials showing how to build your own game with Cubio, including step-by-step examples similar to how we created Citywars Tower Defense.
If you enjoy experimenting with game creation tools and don’t mind exploring something still evolving, feel free to dive in and share your feedback with us.
🚀 Massive Technical Improvements
A huge amount of work went into the foundation of this update.
Some of the improvements include:
• Much smaller game download size • Faster runtime loading so the game can stream content dynamically instead of packing everything into the initial build • More content delivered dynamically at runtime, allowing us to update and expand the game more efficiently • New runtime-editable font system, giving us more flexibility for UI improvements and future localization • Improved voice dialogue with better integration with npc voice • Improved startup tutorial area to help new players get into the game more smoothly • New dynamic skybox system that allows environments to evolve more naturally • New cross-server friend system, allowing friends to connect across multiple game servers • Unified development pipeline for all games
In short: the game is now lighter, faster to update, and easier for us to expand moving forward.
👕 Lost Your Favorite Skin?
With the new system, some older skins unfortunately could not be carried over. The previous skin format was incompatible with the new runtime system, which means certain outfits may no longer appear the same way they did before.
We know this can be a bit of a bummer, especially if you had a favorite look for your character. We did our best to preserve as much as possible during the transition.
The good news is that the new system makes creating skins much easier on our side.
So if you’re a longtime Citywars player and one of your favorite skins disappeared, feel free to reach out to us on Discord. We’d genuinely love to help and in some cases we may even be able to craft a custom skin for you as a thank-you for supporting the game before this update.
🏁 About Citywars 1.0
Originally, we hoped this update could become Citywars 1.0.
Since the Early Access launch, Citywars Tower Defense has grown tremendously through continuous updates, expanding from a single biome into a much larger experience with many towers, maps, and gameplay systems.
All of those improvements have been part of the journey toward the full release.
However, because the Unity migration became time-sensitive, we decided to focus on delivering this critical infrastructure update first rather than delaying everything further.
The road to 1.0 is still ahead of us, and we’ll continue refining the game as we approach that milestone.
If there are features you believe would help shape the final release, we’d love to hear your ideas. Your feedback will help guide the final steps toward an official launch.
❤️ Thank You
This update represents a major step forward for both Citywars Tower Defense and the technology powering it.
There may be a few bumps while we finish smoothing everything out, but the foundation is now much stronger for the future.
Thank you for sticking with us and helping shape the game.