LudumData

Mininum Viable Tower by smilewood

[raw]
made by smilewood for Ludum Dare 49 (COMPO)

Someone built us a bunch of towers and filled them with all this useless structural support. If only someone could come along and blast them out of the way!

Minimum Viable Tower is a puzzle(ish) game with the goal of getting the highest possible score in each level. Blast useless support beams out of the way to make the least stable tower that can still stand.

Blasting.png

You get points for blasting blocks, but if they are high up in the tower they will likely be worth more to you when the final points are tallied.

Created in Unity, using Aseprite for the art and Audacity for sound effects. Background music created using Chrome Music Lab.

This was my second attempt at a game for this jam, after spending the first third of the event fighting (and losing to) the Unity physics engine. Once I woke up and decided to start again this game came together with almost no fuss, a nice change. While I can think of more that would have been nice to have in this game I am very happy with what it is, especially as I managed to do the polishing that I have missed in the past, like sound effects and music. Finally getting all these pieces down, only took 7 solo game jams.

Link https://smilewood.itch.io/mininum-viable-tower
Link https://github.com/smilewood/LD49/releases/tag/0.1
Link https://github.com/smilewood/LD49/releases/download/0.1/MinTower_Win.zip
Link https://github.com/smilewood/LD49/releases/download/0.1/MinTower_macOS.zip
Link https://github.com/smilewood/LD49/releases/download/0.1/MinTower_Linux.zip
Original URL https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/49/mininum-viable-tower

Ratings

Overall 214th 3.604⭐ 26🧑‍⚖️
Fun 123th 3.729⭐ 26🧑‍⚖️
Innovation 247th 3.396⭐ 26🧑‍⚖️
Theme 99th 4.083⭐ 26🧑‍⚖️
Graphics 392th 3.146⭐ 26🧑‍⚖️
Audio 294th 3.042⭐ 26🧑‍⚖️
Humor 231th 2.881⭐ 23🧑‍⚖️
Mood 313th 3.136⭐ 24🧑‍⚖️
Given 26🗳️ 21🗨️

Feedback

SlimmerBurger
04. Oct 2021 · 00:20 UTC
I could see this working really well as a mobile game, feels a lot like jenga but you're trying to knock everything down
Richard Baron
04. Oct 2021 · 00:32 UTC
This is actually a great idea and a really fun game. I would un-ironically play this any time. fantastic work!
Nick Barrash
04. Oct 2021 · 00:32 UTC
Feels pretty polished! Actually requires some strategy to clean out the levels. Nice job
Mathiouza
04. Oct 2021 · 00:33 UTC
Ahah I felt the "I wanna try to do random stuff" on the 12th level x)

Good game! I liked the feeling of it. Would've been great to see my best score after finishing all the levels, but that's detail.
butterfly
04. Oct 2021 · 00:35 UTC
Fun game, with more features, scenic levels and a different background music this could actually make a good full game(outside of LD).
Delightfullymad
04. Oct 2021 · 00:36 UTC
Very fun and simple idea. well done!
syg
04. Oct 2021 · 00:51 UTC
The goal is a bit confusing at first. Took me some reasoning and trials to understand that the goal is to keep the tower as high as possible.

I understand that you tried to incentivize the player to blow up as many blocks as possible while keeping the tower as high as possible but the scoring system makes it a bit unclear sometimes to know whether I should blow up a block or keep it. Maybe display the score on each block? Or better, update/display the total score in real time?

Otherwise simple and fun, fits the theme really well. Good job!

- syg
Dobryn
04. Oct 2021 · 01:41 UTC
Really nice concept and enjoyed the gameplay. I have played games like these but can't pinpoint the genre but I love these.
I wonder if there is one best solution for keeping the most important blocks.
Cyanowski
04. Oct 2021 · 01:45 UTC
Really fun game. I like the strategy and thought involved - it kept me interested. It's true that I forgot the idea was to keep the tower as high as possible, but I still had a lot of fun playing it.
🎤 smilewood
04. Oct 2021 · 02:21 UTC
@syg I agree, having a better breakdown of score is something that I would have loved to do but just didn't have the time. My thought was to have the level complete screen show what each block was worth so you could get an idea there of the difference in points from leaving the structure standing. I can see how having some way to tell if a block would be worth more before blasting it would be helpful, although I don't know how much I would want to clutter up the screen with numbers on every block.

@mathiouza I don't know what you are talking about :P That level was a lot of adding blocks and seeing how the physics physicsd. I was trying to make a stack that, while it was standing, was falling apart at the same time and only held together by the weight of things on top.

@dobryn I was thinking of a specific flash game when I was putting it together, although I cannot recall the name of it.
Twigg
04. Oct 2021 · 03:19 UTC
This is very, very nicely done. The concept is quite good, fits the theme perfectly. Your level design is sometimes questionable and your difficulty curve is nonsense, but the fact that design is what I dislike most speaks volumes about how well-executed this concept is. I wish you had considered what happens to blocks that fall off the edge, as watching them slide away into the void was a little weird. Overall a very good concept executed cleanly, suits your general development style too!
Mordrick
04. Oct 2021 · 06:49 UTC
Hey ^^ - Very nice concept!

I'm happy to see a fellow physics juggler here :).

You got me at 3 or 4 levels where I thought I was smart but then everything collapsed because I hadn't watched carefully enough. A super cool approach on the theme and a simple but challenging gameplay. The music makes this an even more whacky game. After all levels the music felt a bit repetitive but that's a minor thing against having music at all :).

Overall a fun approach and a nice casual game!

### Bugs encountered

- I could push the score button over and over again and it always summed up the score so I cheated my way to a high score ;)
- I could not click the main menu button after the last level. It greyed out but nothing happened.
dooleus
04. Oct 2021 · 18:36 UTC
enjoyed the music. interesting mechanics.
Trexxak
04. Oct 2021 · 21:52 UTC
I forgot about the game's name before starting it, so I would just blow stuff up and hope It was enough stuff laying around to get to the next level and I still managed to beat the game :'D So it is easy enough for a jam game, that's for sure, and what's more is that blowing stuff up is always fun.

Thank you for the fun you brought me with blowing stuffs up :D
Casteled
04. Oct 2021 · 23:02 UTC
Nice simple game, very unstable. I liked the sfx for the bombs, and overall a very creative idea. Nice work!
irwatts
05. Oct 2021 · 04:36 UTC
I was just having fun blindly blowing things up until I realized what the actual goal was! The difficulty may be a bit too forgiving since I was able to bumble my way to the end. Cool!
Jupiter_Hadley
06. Oct 2021 · 11:38 UTC
Interesting idea! I included it in my Ludum Dare 49 compilation video series, if you’d like to take a look. :) https://youtu.be/jL-Xn4X6IAQ
BarelyEvenGames
09. Oct 2021 · 01:20 UTC
Cool game! It’s like an angry birds strategy game. I really dig it! I found it was more fun to get a lower score rather than a higher score by making every thing onto each other, maybe that was the intended way to play? Great job!
LeviDSmith
09. Oct 2021 · 02:16 UTC
Not sure if I fully understood the scoring system, but I did enjoy blowing up the blocks. I think if each stage had a target score to pass, it would make it more challenging. I also really liked the name of the game!
ruruie
17. Oct 2021 · 00:44 UTC
This is a nice little physics game though there are some bugs, such as with the sounds and also you can keep pressing Score to multiply your score. I myself wasn't able to figure out many ways to optimize besides knocking out blocks higher up though as the pieces seem very fragile.