Towers: Development complete

Full disclosure: This game was not made using any Torque product. Nevertheless, I wanted to share it with the community. I've worked as an artist on several projects with the good folks that frequent GarageGames (the most recent being Stinky Kitty Slots, a great little slot machine game for the iPhone/iPad that I definitely encourage everyone to check out; itunes.apple.com/us/app/stinky-kitty-slots/id502387898?mt=8) However, this is the first game where both the art and design are entirely mine, and I am at liberty to share a lot of useful information about it.

Over the next few weeks, I hope to post some useful tidbits about our development process, and, more importantly, our experiences trying to sell an indie game through Apple's App Store. Hopefully, there will be a lot of good stuff that's useful to any indie developer, regardless of the tools they use.

Towers is a retro-styled dodging game for the iPhone and iPad. It was mainly inspired by Japanese bullet hell games. I always thought a good bullet hell game was beautiful to behold, but the level of difficulty made them accessible to a somewhat limited audience. I've been interested in getting a strong entry into the app store for a while now, and after some observations on what elements made certain mobile games successful, I've come up with a somewhat friendlier take on the bullet hell genre, with some lite RPG elements thrown in for good measure.


In Towers, your task is simple: steer the character around on a rising elevator platform while dodging a hail of bullets, blades, lasers, and a whole lot of other hazardous objects. In some cases, the obstacles may be nearly impossible to dodge... Fortunately, the buttons on the right side of the screen grant your character some very powerful abilities. The Shield button protects your character from harm for a short while, and also converts any bullets that hit you into mana. The Blast button takes a bit of mana to use, but destroys all guns and bullets on screen -- unless you hold it down for a powerful Charged Blast, that takes out even the most durable obstacles. The Reverse button takes a whole lot of mana, but transforms every bullet on screen into a tiny homing health power-up. All of these abilities have a short cooldown period.


Every time you die or reach the top of a tower, you are awarded EXP points for your efforts. You can use EXP to unlock different Perks that make your character considerably harder to kill. The Perks screen can be seen below.


The game features 4 "main" levels and 8 "challenge" levels, with the later being unlocked as you reach certain heights on any tower. Towers supports GameCenter, with several different leaderboards and currently 11 achievements available.

I would love to have some comments on the look and design of the game, especially if this sounds like the kind of title you might like to play. I look forward to getting the game out into the wilderness of the App Store, and to sharing my experiences with all of you! Wish me luck. :)