Towercraft

About the game

A floor slides back and forth above your tower. When you stop it, it stays where it is: if it sits exactly on the floor below, nothing is lost; if it hangs over the edge, the part that sticks out is cut off, and every floor after that is that much narrower. Miss the tower entirely and the game is over. Every floor also moves a little faster than the one before it, so the margin for error shrinks as you go up.

That is the whole game, and it is built to be played in short, tense rounds. The tower is drawn with small details (windows, a door at the bottom, and a few builders on the top floor), and as it climbs the scenery changes: the sky darkens every ten floors and different things drift past, from a duck and a small airplane to clouds, a flying saucer, a space telescope and, very high up, the Moon. When the floors get narrow the music changes to a faster tune.

Towercraft is by Son Link, made with the Pyxel game engine for Python, and it fits in less than 25 KB of game files.

Playing it here

The first time you click Play the page downloads Pyxel and the Python runtime (about 15 MB), which takes a few seconds; after that the game shows a "click to start" prompt, and one more click starts it with sound. Nothing is loaded from other sites. The game does not keep a high score, so there is nothing to save; your best tower is the one you remember.

The game was made for portrait screens, so on a computer it appears as a tall, narrow window. On the web we turned off the Esc key that closes the game on the desktop, because on a web page it would only freeze the screen. To start over, reload the page.

Controls

A few things worth knowing

Watch the edges, not the middle. What counts is how much of the moving floor overlaps the one below, so stop it when its two ends are as close as possible to the ends of the floor below.

It gets faster with every floor. The speed goes up a little each time you place one, so the rhythm you found on the first floors will not work for long; keep adjusting.

The score is the width. Each floor adds its width to your points, so a tower of wide floors beats a taller tower of narrow ones.

Frequently asked questions

Is my score saved? No. The game only shows your floors and points during the round and in the Game Over box.

Does it work on a phone? Yes, in the sense that a tap stops the floor, and the game is the right shape for a phone held upright. We have only tested it with a keyboard.

Why does it say "click to start"? Browsers only allow sound after you interact with the page, so the Pyxel launcher asks for one click before it starts the game.

Is it free? Yes: Towercraft is free software under the GNU GPL, version 3, and the source code of this build is available from this page.

Credits and licence

Towercraft was made by Son Link (Alfonso Saavedra), the only author of the repository: the code, the logo, the pixel art and sound effects in the resource file, and the three songs, in the Pyxel format. The author thanks Rafa Lagoon and Baitty for advice, with Baitty also helping with sound effects and music, and the colours come from the Sweetie-16 palette by GrafxKid. The game is free software under the GNU General Public License, version 3; the build served here changes only one thing (the Esc key that quits is turned off), and its complete source code and the patch are hosted alongside the game. It runs on the Pyxel engine (MIT) and the Pyodide runtime (MPL-2.0), whose licences and source are linked from the Licenses page.