About this project
€51,504
1,984
NEW BACKERS : CLICK HERE FOR EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW!
FLOOR 2: Amiga ports ( 46.000€ ) UNLOCKED!
This stretch goal will finance the Amiga ports of the game.
MIN. SPECS.:
AOS4: AOS 4.1, PPC >=700 MHz, Radeon with W3D or Compositing
MorphOS: MOS >= 3.6, Gfx card with TinyGL 3D acceleration
AROS: x86, gfx card with Mesa 3D acceleration
FLOOR 3: Modding tools ( 51.000€ )
This stretch goal will finance a proper WYSIWYG editor, integrating all the required tools to build levels from the ground up with your own assets or ours.
FLOOR 4: Console ports ( 71.000€ )
This stretch goal will give us the resources to port the game to PS4, XBox One, and Wii U.
ADD-ONS:
To claim one or more add-ons, simply increase your pledge by the corresponding amount, and specify which add-ons you would like in the post-campaign survey!
- Your name as Easter egg [TEXT] : your name will show up on a political poster, be mentioned in NPC chat, in some advertisement, inside of terminals, etc.
- Your name as Easter egg [GFX] : design your own Easter egg, for example a graffiti for the lower floors, or an ad for the information kiosks of the upper floors. When inspected, the item will display your name or a short message of your choice.
- Boxed copy : an additional boxed copy of the game (for backers who pledged 35€ and up)
CURRENT BACKER ACHIEVEMENTS:
click here to participate in the Twitter Followers Achievement
click here to participate in the Photographs and Facebook Likes Achievements
More info in this update.
REWARDS:
SOME PRESS:
The full list of our press mentions can be found in our Press Kit, along with HD screenshots, the trailer, and more information!
PIXEL ART LOVERS can watch the creation of the game's assets live on Cyangmou's stream. If you wish to get an automated email notification whenever his stream goes up (usually a couple of times a week), all you have to do is sign up to Picarto and follow him.
On to the good stuff:
Tower 57 is an old-school twin stick shooter that takes you to the beautiful ruins of a decadent art deco-meets-cyberpunk world, where humanity is split between warring societies living in mega-towers surrounded by radioactive wasteland.
Your mission, as a member of a special investigative force, is to infiltrate the reclusive Tower 57 and thwart their plans for an invasion that could spell doom for your home tower.
The game features 16-bit pixel art in a 1920's art-deco-inspired dystopian cyberpunk setting.
The engine focuses on giving you options to let you play the way you want.
Your environment is destructible, so use the battleground in your favor.
Play with friends in local co-op and combine your weapons for extra firepower.
Leave your mark on the Tower.
Unload your weapons on unsuspecting furniture, statues, lights, and much more!
Everything from debris and shell casings to bloody footprints will remain permanently!
While playing with a game-pad, use the left stick to move, and the right stick to independently aim in any direction.
Don't like thumbsticks? Use your mouse and keyboard, which you can remap to your liking.
Complex situations arising from simple systems interacting with each other.
These systems drive the world's rules: fire spreads, electricity travels down the path of least resistance, etc.
The game gives you tools and goals, and it's up to you to figure out how to use one to achieve the other within this framework.
Everything is more fun with a friend, so Tower 57 was designed with a heavy emphasis on co-op.
Flank your enemies, bait them into an ambush, leverage co-op specific weapons, or combine your regular weapons for increased firepower and new effects!
Tower 57 is coming to PC, Mac, and Linux.
Once touted as self-sustaining utopias, designed to protect and nurture its citizens for generations to come, the Towers provided a safe-heaven where mankind could hope to forget its past and start afresh.
But old habits die hard…
Locked in a perennial cold war against each other, most Towers are now but a crumbling shell of their former selves.
You play one of the six members of the team assembled by the Ministry of Information to investigate the growing reports of an impending invasion from the neighboring Tower 57.
Get in, find out what you can, and put a stop to it by any means necessary!
Find your way through a maze of floors connected by elevators, a central hub filled with shops and terminals, and a multitude of secret walls and uncharted passage-ways leading to forgotten parts of the tower.
Pick your hero among a cast of 6 unique characters, each sporting their own look, perks, and special skills.
Tower 57 features a wide spectrum of unique weapons, which vary in damage, range, reloadtime and special abilities.
The characteristics of each weapon determine the interaction with the environment, so your weapon choice will heavily affect your fighting strategies.
Weapons can be picked up throughout the levels, and later purchased in the hub. You can even upgrade your favorite boomsticks at the terminals.
More weapons are in the prototyping or polish phase, including but not limited to:
The rocket launcher: slow-ish, area damage, only slightly phallic
The tesla connectors: these orbs stick to enemies (or players), creating deadly arcs of lightning when two orbs are close enough
The black hole generator: create a temporary black-hole that sucks in everything around it (including players)
The hacking tool: turn robots and turrets against each other or disable security cameras
The beamer: instantly switch places with your target through the power of pseudo-scientific techno-babble
Each enemy features its own distinct spawning mechanism, movement patterns, attack patterns, and weaknesses.
The old sewer system that runs under the entire tower, it provides the ideal entry point to bypass security checks.
It's also where all of the tower's waste ends up, so be on the lookout for any signs of mutated life!
Nicknamed "the basement", this is where all the merchandise entering the tower is processed by customs, before being shipped to the upper floors.
This floor is raided often due to the abundance of goods, so security is pretty tight and cameras keep a watchful eye over the premises.
Cheap distractions are often used to prevent social unrest, and the tower's elite is well aware of this fact.
Anything goes on this floor: drugs, cheap mutant sex, robot fights, illegal gambling, a sprawling black market, and much more!
The inscrutable Grutin Inc. holds a tight monopoly on the tower's engineering and manufacturing processes.
Normally a quiet floor after closing time, the factory has seen an unusual increase of nightly activity, with mysterious men in lab coats seen roaming around...
Unholy experiments are rumored to be carried out in these facilities, as anyone who's ever been "admitted" has never been seen again.
Not that it would matter however, since the nurses exclusively hunt for patients among the poor and wretched inhabiting the lower floors...
The upper floors are reserved for the elite of the Tower. Here you will find such luxuries as sunlight and clean air.
These floors also boast the tower's most advanced biometric security systems, which can only be fooled by procuring the severed limb of an accredited person.
PLEASE NOTE: Designs can be in the form of ideas, sketches, reference material, etc. However Cyangmou will take care of realizing the design in order to preserve consistency of the art style.
A DRM-free copy of the game one week before we officially launch.
Your name on the Founders' Monument in Amor's Den.
This monument will be placed prominently at an accessible point of the map and can be examined by players.
It will contain a list of each backer from the = Backer = tier and up, sorted by pledge amount.
An exclusive Tower 57 Kickstarter wallpaper (1920 * 1080px).
A 640 * 480px digital postcard for you to print or share online with your friends.
Your version of the game will feature a special backers-only hat, which can be claimed for free in the shops of the game.
A digital artbook containing game design notes, graphic design notes, sprites, background knowledge & explanations.
Digital copy of the original soundtrack created by Rafael Langoni Smith. http://rafaelsmith.com/
A backers-only character featuring unique visuals, perks, and a high-level starting weapon.
Three additional copies of the game to gift to your friends on the system of your choice.
32x32 big pixel art avatar done by Cyangmou. It can be a photograph rendition or anything else that fits the canvas.
Become one of the Tower’s news reporter and write up to ten news-stories - a catchy headline + one or two paragraphs - to be displayed across the news terminals in the game.
Of course this tier also includes all the rewards from the previous tiers - therefore the Beta as well.
Got any questions about pixel art? An art session with Cyangmou might be the right reward for you!
* Requires Skype
** Available in English or German
Got any questions about code? A coding session with benitosub might be the right reward for you!
* Requires Skype
** Available in English, French, Italian, or Spanish.
Join the BETA phase of development, play the game before everybody else, help us find bugs and fine-tune gameplay, and make your feedback count!
Design a hat which will be available to all players in the game's shop. Can be serious or silly, but the size should not exceed 48*48px.
Design one of the statues that will decorate the hub area. Chose its in-game caption for all players to read and marvel at your wits.
Design one of the NPCs of the hub area: determine his appearance, write his lines, and decide his fate in the game.
Design an enemy from the ground up: his appearance, his movement patterns, his attack patterns, his weaknesses, and his general behavior.
Our goal with this campaign is to raise enough funds to allow us to focus full-time on Tower 57 and, depending on how well we do, increase the scope of the game and add features.
A Kickstarter campaign is also a unique opportunity to connect with our potential players, and most importantly, gain the valuable feedback that will enable us to make the game people truly want to play!
Tower 57 is developed using our own custom engine. The engine is written entirely in C++ for performance and portability, and uses SDL / OpenGL for rendering, sound, and input processing.
The Art of Tower 57 is inspired by 2 main sources
1) The books of Jules Verne and Ayn Rand. While these are written texts, and as such are completely open for painterly interpretation, it's more about the feeling we want to evoke - a world rich in details and driven by science.
2) 90's „timeless“ games. Many great companies from that era such as Square, The Bitmap Brothers or SNK invested heavily in graphics, and a lot of their games are still remembered fondly today for their art (Metal Slug comes to mind for example)
I’ve been making games professionally for a little over 12 years now, and as a hobby for approximately 20 years.
I'm handling the coding side of things on Tower 57, as well as sharing game design, level design, and lore decisions with Cyangmou.
I am a professional artist, and have been working for the past 2 years as a freelancer on various projects.
In addition to graphics and visual design of the world, my duties on Tower 57 also include game design, level design, and creating the world-feel.
I'm a pianist, world traveler and musical Ronin, carrying a Master's Degree in Composition and writing music for games for about 10 years. I started out young. Playing that much piano made me an excellent thumb war duelist.
Risks and challenges
There are numerous risks involved in any game's development. Here is how we plan to minimize them:
- running out of time: we have roughly 70% of the planned features in, with all the core systems implemented, and an established workflow to produce content. The planned release date should only shift if we reach stretch goals.
- running out of money: although we wish to avoid running out of money at any cost, we've had some contacts with publishers who kindly mentioned the possibility of negotiating an advance if we fail to reach our Kickstarter goal or end up short on funds.
- artistic differences: in order to guarantee the project's continuation, we have both signed a contract explicitly detailing what happens in the event of a team member's departure.
- the game being a turd: we both have enough industry experience to confidently claim the game *will* ship. However to ensure it ships in its best possible form, we plan to leverage the support and precious feedback from our backers through the releases of a backer demo and beta version.
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Funding period
- (30 days)