Making of

There isn’t a lot to say about Tower Up. I saw that the 1-bit Jam was happening, with the theme Tower, and decided to participate. I pretty quickly had an idea, and executing it wasn’t that hard. I actually started with the art first, since I already had a pretty solid vision.

After making the art, I got the game running in a good amount of time. I wasn’t sure what I wanted the lose condition to be. At first, there wasn’t any void around the platform, and I was just going to detect if the tower lost height. But that felt unfair, and extremely hard. So I ended up going with the classic health system.

The main problem with this game was the balancing (hehe, get it?). It’s a really hard game, but it was even harder in the first iteration. There used to be a triangle piece until I realized that was hell. Did I remove it? Of course not! If you reach 200m, it gets added to your bag… It’s just basically impossible to reach that mark. In the first iteration you also just had to deal with the piece you got. You couldn’t hold it (like in Tetris), nor rotate it (like in Tetris). But I ended up adding those after some feedback.

The final result looks like this:

Fun fact: The force that the pieces drop with is actually a direct result of the little scale animation it does when you place them. During that animation, it’s actually accumulating gravity, so it ends up with a lot of force. This was unintentional, but ended up being a pretty big part of the fun and strategy of the game.

Anyways, that’s it! Play it here and let me know what you think.