April 26th-29th 2013 :: Theme: Minimalism
Ludum Dare 26 — April 26-29th, 2013
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"Tower of Pixel" is a minimalistic reinterpretation of the story behind the tower of Babel.
=== Description ===
Once there were pixels.
They found a plain and settled there.
Then they said: "Let us build ourselves a city with a tower that reaches to the heavens."
=== Gameplay ===
- Collect bricks from the abandoned tower of Pixel and use them to reach to the heavens.
- Enchanted gems will help you building your tower faster.
- The game has two possible endings.
- If you are stuck, please refer to this walkthrough:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1NMEss4zdqk
=== Controls ===
- Arrows to move and dig bricks.
- Space to lay collected bricks.
=== Updates ===
Since the end of Ludum Dare, there have been few bug fixes. Source code, Windows and Linux versions have not been updated. Play the Web version, if possible.
=== Credits ===
Alan Zucconi
www.alanzucconi.com
@AlanZucconi
Downloads and Links
Ratings
 | Coolness | 100% |
| #196 | Mood | 3.38 |
| #207 | Graphics | 3.66 |
| #374 | Audio | 3.00 |
| #382 | Overall | 3.34 |
| #430 | Innovation | 3.28 |
| #618 | Humor | 2.14 |
| #688 | Fun | 2.83 |
| #816 | Theme | 3.27 |
Comments
Absolutely brilliant. Really zen feel to it, loved the writing, the music arrangement and zoning, the weird complexity of the mechanics that seem simple at first. Can't wait to go back to this and get stuck into it.
Thank you Yngar! Even though I am the leader of the rebellion front against #potato, I promise I'll play your game till the end! XD
"Tower of Pixel" starts slow, but as soon as you reach the top of the unfinished Pixel tower, things will happen and you'll learn how to... use crystals to summon towers! :-)
Oh, also it saves automatically! :-) Re-open it and your tower will still be there! :)
I really enjoyed the mood and atmosphere. This game surprised me and beat my expectations. Thanks for making it!
Love the artstyle and ahem, the Babel tower inspiration :) It's a cool idea, great work!
You really need some indication how far there is to go in total... I spent far too long on this! Is good but gave up because I had no idea when/if it would ever end
Hi papa_troll! Thank you for the feedback!
At the beginning the game shows the "top" of the sky, so you have an idea of how long it takes to reach it!
You can build your tower, however there are ways in the game to summon very long ladders that you can climb! :-)
If you open the game again, your tower will still be there! :D Don't give up! :-p
nice stuff, I wonder how high I can tower. Quite relaxing in a funny sort of way. I love this type of casual game actually, must dip into it again. Thank you
Hi jackspinoza!
At the beginning of the game you always start from the "top" of the sky. That's the limit of your tower! :-)
However, if you close and reopen the game, you can continue building your tower. No need to restart every time! :-)
Kinda slow on my PC, made it unberable t oplay after a while, altrough I liked the idea, it would be nice to see it executed properly (Y)
Haha I see what you mean with them being similar. I love this game, so relaxing and satisfying as you climb higher, but man, such nice graphics! Really cool entry!
Cool idea, neat graphics and interesting mechanic. It performed a bit poorly on my machine though (Dell XPS 16)
Good, relaxing game. Maybe you should add some blocks that allow other building patterns, ie. blocks that can be placed under your feet to form horizontal walks? Anyway: I really liked it. Good job.
Ps. I got stuck in a situation like this: http://imgur.com/UZfy19M It may be a bug. (or it may be a feature of eliminating not smart enough people like myself :))
Hey 3.14! How did you do that? XD Quite bizarre! :)
Actually, I though about this. Close the game and re-open it. Your tower will be exactly the same, but you will start from a different position. It might help you! :-)
At the beginning you could place horizontal tiles, but then I removed this option. It would allow people to make "unrealistic" towers. Well... not that the current ones are realistic! :p But you got my point!! :D
Hey danielcmessias, siondream!
The game buffers your changes and it flushes them into the Flash cache. Some users had poor performances because of this. I am trying to improve it on the web version. Tomorrow it might be faster! :-)
Playing this game made me feel really chill. The music was perfect and it was a relaxing, fun, interesting game.
Cool stuff
Nice! I could probably play this for WAY too long. Love the auto-save. I'll definitely be coming back to this one. :)
Cute! Cool idea and it looks lovely.
I found the way you auto-dig a bit annoying sometimes though, it's very easy to walk into a block and pick it up by mistake, which can sometimes force you to backtrack your tower loads.
Hey Norgg, thank you for your feedback!
Yes, I am trying to tweak a little bit some parameters of the game. Like the friction with blocks (it was very easy to "slip") and the interaction with the background.
I'll try to improve that as well. Thank you! :)
Very neat idea! Really like the graphics and backstory too, nice work :)
The web version is running incredibly slow for me in chrome. It looks interesting though :)
It was quite good, but the display was too tall for my monitor.
Hey mtthwcmpbll!
The majority of users who report problems used IEx! You're actually the first one to have this in Chrome!
The game automatically saves your status (if you change something!) every 10-15 seconds. This might cause periodic delays. For me, the speed of the game changes a lot if you are using Chrome or IEx. I don't know why! :\
I thought that this was a beautifully polished game and a clever use of the theme. I didn't catch the building bug though so the mechanic became tedious for me pretty quickly.
Pretty awesome entry! Congratulations.
I loved the spacial challenge of deciding where and how to dig in order to maximize my building capacity
Neat! Progression was a little slow for my taste due to the small "inventory" size, but I really like the game. There's definitely a strong drive to keep on climbing.
Impressive but I found it pretty boring. I read that you can do some cool stuff here apparently but I can't really figure it out? Plus it's a major pain trying to get the blocks placed, it feels like what is referring to as "nerd poling" in minecraft except with only 5 blocks or however many at a time and the game is very harsh if you accidentally hit left even just a bit too much, consequently screwing everything up. I think I was supposed to do something with the blue blocks but I couldn't find a way to get to the top where the other two blocks were with the third blue block because it always wanted to immediately place that one, other than build some elaborate staircase to get up but that would be a massive pain and take forever so I didn't do that.
I guess it's just personal taste but if I was in the mood for some really relaxing "tedious" game play this would be a good option.
Really relaxing game. I went for digging to the bottom after I hit the first blue wall. The controls were kinda iffy at times, especially if you pick up blocks by accident, but other than that a really decent game!
Wonderful game. Relaxing, excellent graphics, and beautiful soundtrack. I almost made it to the top. It kept me engaged for quite some time. Thanks for making this.
The art and music were both really nice, and the idea for the game is unique. However I personally found the gameplay a little tedious, or at least, the proposed goal - I had more fun digging around and trying to go as low as possible, rather than up. :P Otherwise, fantastically implemented game in such a small space of time. Kudos to you, sir.
Excellent polished game with a really interesting concept. I really like it !! Well done :)
I like the artistic style of your game (graphics and sound). I needed a while to find out, that you can only dig some blocks and than need to place them to make room for more.
I like what this is based off of. :) I wish there was sideways placement though (or more inventory space).
Hi spacechase0!
Initially... there were sideways placement hehe!
But this would allow people to build crazy structures that wouldn't look like a tower at all! :-)
While parts of it could be better conveyed, I still liked it particularly the visual aesthetics. Pretty unique compared to what I've seen in this LD thus far.
The game's cute :D ... And it took me a lot of time to build the tower... I enjoyed this.
Great, but It will be very much cool in multiplayer cooperativ/competitiv.
good stuff.. quite relaxing ..nice mechanic aswell :)
Really liked the art style and theme. Wish the digging was a little faster and there was some indication of the objective and progress.
Wow great game. simple, well done and you even put the parallax in there!
Yeah, I didn't finished it, but definitely will come back to my tower later ;) Pretty addictive game!
A bit too slow,but nice idea, nice game, cute character, good atmosphere! Well done!
Cool game, I think! A bit too slow gameplay for my liking though:(
Cool and inspirational game! A little slow maybe, but this helps the zen sensation
really cool but need to be a little faster -- and maybe allow holding more blocks at a time -- great game! oh yeah -- did not hear any music or sound?
You can summon ladders!? *finds this out after spending ages beating the game* probably not the intended/proper ending though :P
The auto dig is a bit annoying, I destroyed a lot of crucial tower components while digging.
Browser version ran a bit slow, but great style. Really liked how I developed different building styles to build quickly. Moving the goal posts felt a bit cheap, especially when I climbed the steps that appeared only to find at the top that I should have brought to bricks with me.
Overall, a really nice experience.
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Its a cool idea. I would like to play some more if you get it running faster.