Rotating Tower Platform Game

Last month I started a prototype for a platform game that took place on a rotating tower. Then life happened and I got busy and it was stuck on the back burner.

But it was in a good enough state to publish the source and let you play now:

• left/right keys to walk
• up/down to climb
• space to jump.
• collect coins
• avoid monsters
• reach the top of the tower

Nebulus (a.k.a Tower Toppler)

If you’ve been around long enough you might have played Nebulus on the c64 (I think it was called ‘Tower Toppler’ on other platforms). It pushed the limits of what the c64 could do graphically, but it was also a great game to play with challenging level design.

This demo isn’t intended to be a clone of Nebulus, merely ‘inspired by’, and obviously has a lot of differences, many of which are simply because I won’t have the time to finish this prototype.

• ladders instead of elevators (easier to program)
• ground instead of water (no need to animate)
• no dissolving platforms
• no shortcut doors
• no exit at top of tower
• no real way to die
• no score
• no timer
• no level design
• coins to collect (I like collecting stuff)

Limitations

Here are a couple more caveats to admit:

• Modern browsers only - Chrome, Firefox, IE9/10
• NO mobile support - If I wanted to build mobile I would go 100% native.
• NO touch support - no mobile, no touch
• NO endgame - it’s just a prototype, only 1 demo level, there is no endgame
• NO menu - it’s just a prototype, there is no menu, high scores, credits, etc

How-it-works

At its heart, its really just a slightly more complex version of my earlier tiny platformer, with some changes:

• The 2D map is rendered as a (simulated) 3D tower
• The 2D map must wrap horizontally
• Entities are bigger than a single cell…
• … making the collision detection more complex
• Real animated sprites instead of plain rectangles

The biggest changes are in the renderer and the collision detection.

I hope to get some time later this week to write up some in-depth articles about those topics:

• Foundations - game loop, resource loading, etc.
• Rendering - how to render a 2-D platform game on a 3-D tower.
• Collision Detection - more collision detection for platform games.

Related Links

In the mean time, you can…

• play the game
• view the source code

• Nebulus on YouTube
• Nebulus on Wikipedia
• Flash version of Nebulus
• Desktop version of Tower Toppler (with source)
• Graphics provided by Open Game Art Bundle

Enjoy!