Last year for April Fool’s, we joked about adding a basketball mode to TowerFall. This year, a fan-mod by Suyo makes it a reality! This is not a prank! Check out the mod here.
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@mattmakesgames-blog
Last year for April Fool’s, we joked about adding a basketball mode to TowerFall. This year, a fan-mod by Suyo makes it a reality! This is not a prank! Check out the mod here.
Box art I made for my friends’ game Celeste. <3 http://www.celestegame.com/
Process:
Procedural Level Mutation
Many games with procedural generation, like Spelunky, build their levels out of interlocking, randomly-chosen level “chunks”, like a big jigsaw puzzle. For TowerFall, the levels are too small to take this approach. Cataclysm, the Dark World’s procedurally generated final tower, instead takes pre-designed layout “shells” and mutates them to generate new stages. The goal is to maximize the amount of meaningful variations that can occur, while eliminating as many broken or unfair outcomes as possible. “Broken” and “unfair” are of course subjective terms, but I’ve developed a good intuitive sense for them over the course of designing and testing more than 160 TowerFall levels.
The first step is to build the basic solid geometry. The black cells above are guaranteed to be solid (at this step, anyway). The red squares are player spawn points, and the pink rectangles are “random areas”. All the Cataclysm levels are symmetrical, so random areas are only placed on the left side of the stage.
TowerFall will randomly fill these pink areas with solids, and it will do so intelligently based on their position. There’s different algorithms for horizontally-wrapping areas, vertically-wrapping areas, free floating ones, and other cases.
Here’s one possible outcome of the geometry mutation.
The next step is to place game objects, such as jump pads, exploding orbs, spikeballs, or ice. This step is more free-form, and each object has its own specialized placement algorithm. I’m still tweaking them all, and trying to decide how common they should be. Even objects like the moving platforms from Thornwood, or the crushers from Sunken City will show up occasionally! While placing game objects, the level geometry may be mutated further.
And finally, we place treasure chests. This is a fairly simple step - any 2-tile-wide floor space with 4 tiles of overhead clearance is eligible for a treasure spawn point. The game randomly picks a few from the list, making sure they aren’t too close together. The big treasure chest is always centered, and prioritizes lower positions over higher ones to counteract height advantage when playing with tournament rules.
A fourth step is coming soon - background tiles. The levels in these screenshots are using the Twilight Spire tilesets as placeholders, but soon Cataclysm will have its own tilesets and randomly-placed background blocks.
All the levels in this post are generated from the same original “shell”. So far we have 12 layouts Cataclysm can generate from. Tonight I’m working on adding some more, as well as tweaking the generation algorithms further. I’m also thinking about the best way to let players fight on Cataclysm using a specific random seed, if they find a set of layouts they particularly love.
Cataclysm is shaping up to be my favorite tower, but there’s still a lot of work left fine-tuning it.
I’m reposting this from the TowerFall blog so some people who asked for it can find it easier! :)
Meet Zoey
This is @amora-b‘s first animation test for Z :D
Today we announced on the PlayStation Blog that TowerFall is launching on PS Vita on December 15th!
My new TowerFall tattoo, long overdue (:
I wrote the introduction for Issue 3 of the Pico-8 Zine! This issue’s theme was ‘Local Multiplayer’.
Arielle is a short, 10-level fan mod of Celeste, by @justinjaffray. The difficulty is pretty intense!
Here’s a talk I gave at Vancouver’s 2015 Full Indie Summit. It’s titled Friendly Fire: Designing TowerFall.
I uploaded another quick TowerFall patch to Steam today! There’s a few balance tweaks and some fixes. Here’s the notes:
Crusher blocks can no longer sense players during their invincibility frames
Changes to the layout of a Dreadwood stage in Dark World mode
Changes to the layout of a Flight stage in Versus mode (see above image)
Fixed a crash when minimizing the game
Fixed a crash with player invisibility when using modded archers
Have fun!
I’m making levels for Z tonight!
The world map is starting to take shape (:
The Triple Boop Open TowerFall tournament was last night in Oakland! Here’s the grand finals. If you click through, the playlist includes videos of all the matches. The competition was intense and there were some amazing plays. So many miracle catches!
Congrats to King of Elks on winning, and Zecmo for taking second place!
I made a Mario Maker level for Polygon! Check out the video for some of the creation process, as well as the level in its entirety. If you have Mario Maker, you can play the level yourself with this code: B575-0000-00F0-81D9
I made this map editor for Z tonight!
Oh, and Z is my temporary codename for my new game :D
Amora’s work-in-progress Dark World archer sketches
Hi hi hi hi hiiii~
SO. There’s a tiny tiny little chance that you already heard me talking about this local multiplayer game called TowerFall. Have you? If not, I’m really surprised & we need to get together & catch up because I’ve been obsessed with this game since it came out on the OUYA back in 2013. (Remember this console? Yes, it existed once.)
I could literally just say *best game* & finish my letter here but I’ll talk to you more about it. (I know, I’m a nice person.)
So TowerFall is, like I said, a local multiplayer game. It involves rapidity, concentration, archery and a lot -a whole lot- of laughs and screams. It’s sincerely my favorite party game because it’s the kind of game that brings people together.
The concept is simple: you have arrows & you need to kill the others & survive. (There’s different game modes but the main idea is to kill and not be killed.) Plus, you have a whole bunch of variants; different types of arrows which mostly depend on which world you play in - some chests appear with shields, lava, slow motion & a whole bunch of different things which add more difficulty to the game. You can ALSO activate those variants after choosing the game mode: I personally adore clicking the ‘random’ button to see how the game can totally explode.
The thing I love the most about TowerFall (hint: everything) is how accessible this game is. Even if I have been playing this game for like two years now, someone who plays for their first time ever can kill me & literally win the match. It’s all because the developers focused so much on this important aspect: accessibility. Almost all of the decisions were made because it was important to them that anyone feel welcome to play TowerFall - and it works, so, so well. Even if it’s a hardcore & competitive game, TowerFall is all about having a nice experience every single time you play it. And it’s wonderful.
Half of the characters are female and none of them are sexualized. They also have a non-binary character. <3
TowerFall is a super gorgeous game - Amora & Pedro did an awesome job with the graphics. The music by Alec Holowka is also catchy and suuuuuper good.(You can listen to it on his bandcamp here!) All of the sound effects, made by PowerUp, add so much to the game too!
TowerFall is all about tiny small details you can discover while you play. You can see the breath of your archer when you play in the ice level (& it cost me a game when I thought I was invisible but my opponent saw me because of that, DAMMIT <3), your wings catch on fire if you fly near lava, all of the hats have a different animation when you lose them, brambles will burn if your arrow catches on fire near a torch & touches the bramble after - aaaaaah!
There are a WHOLE bunch of hardcore TowerFall tournaments around the world - you should check if there’s one in your city. It’s pretty fun to play against strangers - & also suuuuuuuuuuuuper challenging. When you play with the same people you start to *know* how the others play & you can trick them, & vice versa - with strangers this ‘comfort zone’ is completely absent & it’s -really- stressful, but super good.
This year they released the Dark World expansion: new characters, new variants but most importantly: a 4-player cooperative mode.
See? Now my favorite local multiplayer game has a LOCAL COOP MODE? I’m in heaven. In this mode you have a certain amount of waves where enemies pop-up & you have to fight a boss at the end of each of those levels. You can choose different degrees of difficulty: Normal, Hardcore, or Legendary - Hardcore is brutal, I’ll let you imagine how Legendary is freaking a nightmare: it took us FOUR DAYS/NIGHTS to beat it AND the creator of the game was playing with us. So yeah, stupidly brutal, but so freaking good.
I could certainly talk so, so, so, SO much more about this game. Over the last year I’ve had the incredible chance to develop a close relationship and became friends with the developers of the game (they are all super lovely, kind and talented people, you should talk to/follow them) - I know this game like the pocket of my favorite dress. But you surely have something else to do with your day (like playing TowerFall.)
I can’t wait to hear back from you about this marvellous game! :D
You can buy the game on Steam &on PS4!