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Hi all! The last time I entered a Game Creators contest was the Retro Remakes compo, and my entry was the unfortunate "Fury" (a remake of Berzerk). Since then, I've been pretty quiet on the forums.

When the Puzzle Compo was announced, a decided take another swing, and so "Tower" was born.

"Tower" plays similiarly to tetris, but instead of clearing lines, you build them onto a tower. Every ring that you complete raises you up the tower giving you more space to build. Your current buildible area is marked by wooden scaffolding around the tower. If a piece ever locks into place at all above these scaffolds, the game ends. You can cover over mistaken rings and keep building, but unless you complete a stack above it, you will quickly run out of space.

You score for every block you place, as well as every stack completed. You can complete multiple stacks at the same time for a point bonus. There are also random Golden blocks. If you complete a stack with one of these, you will receive a large point bonus!

The game has five levels, and then comtinues forever. At this point in time, the game is basically finished, but I still need to test it on some other computers. If I find a place to host it, I will put it online before the deadline; otherwise, it will be submitted for this coming monday. For now, I'll attach a screenshot!

Looks like a nice variation on the theme.

Can I suggest you change the colour of the score, or outline it or something? It seems to fade into the background.

Hey, thanks for the comment! Do others agree? I could change the color easily... but I've got something even better! Thanks to a friend of mine, I've been able to post a beta version of the game. Here's the link:

http://syntax.pfak.org/~mark/Tower.zip

Try it out and tell me if it works, any problems, etc. This is basically the complete version. In theory, it should work all the way through level 5. After level five, it goes on forever, until you quit or lose. Unfortunately, we all know how theories go... so tell me if it doesn't work right. I haven't been able to test it all the way yet.

A few notes:

The controls are listed in the game, along with a tutorial, but here they are again just in case:

Left/Right or Mouse Movement: Move the piece around the tower

Control Key or [RIGHT MOUSE BUTTON] : Drop the Block

Up or [LEFT MOUSE BUTTON]: Flip the block 180 degrees (if it can be)

Down or Middle Mouse Button: Speed up the falling speed (without dropping the block)

Escape Key: End the game.

Ok, the rest can be explained in game. If by any chance you want to reset the highscores, this can be accomplished by deleting the Tower.dat file in the /data directory.

Have fun, and any comments (good or bad) are welcome. Thanks!


Edit:

Thanks to Zone Chicken for noticing that I consistently screwed up the mouse control instructions: I put brackets around the now corrected controls. Stupid me.

hey not too bad It was pretty fun to play!

Only two suggestions, I would personally like to see a few more peices to place, especially ones that take care of single block holes, i was often waiting ages to get something i could use to plug a hole. Also, and i know this would be a buggger to implement AND keep the blocks lined up, but i would like to see rotation a bit smoother. Atm it does feel very jerky and at one point I thought it might be lag :/

But it was fun to play, good job ^^ Nice take on the tetris theme!

Hey, thanks for the input! This is exactly why I wish I got the game up sooner

I've been wondering about the piece selection for sometime now, but after a few initial overhauls, I settled on these pieces. Still, you're right about the waiting for single pieces! I'll see what I can do.

As for the jerkiness, yeah, thats laziness on my part I suppose... it kept things nice and simple in the camera department. Maybe I can polish it up before the deadline, but I'm runnning out of time.

Thanks again!

That was awesome. It was reallt fun and the graphics are really good.

I have to agree with Sephnroth though. The controls are a bit jerky. I also think that the game would be even better if you could rotate the pieces by 90 degrees and not 180.