One tap, one city: Tower Slide's first two days
TL;DR: Tower Slide is a one-tap 3D tower-stacking game that runs in your browser, on a computer or a phone. It is two days old, and it exists for one reason: to take a small game all the way through publishing on CrazyGames.
Why this game
Tank Battle grew into a large project. Tower Slide is the opposite experiment: one simple game loop, kept small on purpose, so that the interesting part is not the game's size but the road to a first release on a games portal. I have never published on CrazyGames, and I want to learn the whole process, from the submission and their QA check to what the numbers say once strangers play it.
A stacking game suits that. The rules fit in one sentence, a run takes a minute or two, and it plays the same with a mouse, a key or a thumb.
What is in it
The loop. A floor slides back and forth above the tower. Tap to drop it. Whatever overhangs is sliced off, and the next floor is only as big as what stayed. Floors arrive from all four sides in turn and get faster as you climb. Miss the tower and the run is over.
Perfect drops. Land a floor dead-centre and nothing is sliced. It keeps a golden seam, and from the third perfect in a row the floors grow back, so a tower that has narrowed can recover.
A city of your own. Every tower you finish is rebuilt at full size behind the next one. After a few runs the backdrop is a skyline of your own games, and you can open it from the home screen and orbit it. Once the ten sites are taken, only a new height record gets in, and it replaces the shortest tower.
Floors and population. The big number is height in floors. Under it is the population: bigger floors house more people, and perfect drops the most. Height earns the ranks, from Garden Shed to Legend.
Two superpowers. Placed floors earn energy. Spend 20 to slow the sliding floor to half speed, or to send a wrecking ball through the last floor you placed and try it again.
Missions and a store. Ten daily missions pay coins, every 10th floor is golden and pays more, and the store sells permanent upgrades.
What I learned: a button nobody could click
The store passed its first test, because the test called the store's code directly. With a real mouse it could not be opened at all: the home panel let the click fall through to the game underneath, which took it as "start a run". Since then, nothing clickable counts as tested until it has had a real click in a real browser.
What CrazyGames asks for
CrazyGames starts a new game with a Basic Launch: a soft launch to a limited audience, with ads off. As I read their documentation, it ends after 7 days and 500 plays, or at 21 days at the latest, and a game is promoted to a full launch only if its numbers are good. Their guidance is an average play time of more than 10 minutes, 10 to 15% of players coming back the next day, and more than 80% staying past the first minute.
The technical requirements are the easy part: the whole game is under 100 KB against a 50 MB limit. The hard part is those numbers. A stacking game is easy to try and easy to leave, so most of the work ahead is about giving people a reason to play a second run, and to come back tomorrow.
What is next
- Getting ready for the portal. Testing on real phones and in Safari, which has not happened yet. Then the CrazyGames SDK, cover art and preview videos, and the submission itself.
- Reasons to come back. The city, the missions and the store are the first attempt. Next are tower themes to unlock, a short hint for a first-time player, and more to do with the city.
- Feel and polish. Sound, music and effects, and tuning how quickly the game gets hard.
How it was made
The whole game is one HTML file with no build step, no libraries and no image or audio files. The 3D is drawn by hand on an ordinary 2D canvas: every solid is a box, projected in perspective and painted in the right order, since there is no depth buffer to sort it out. Every sound is synthesized in the browser. The sky follows the time of day, and your progress is saved in the browser.
Try it
Play here: https://tower-slide.1305games.com/. I would like to know how many floors you reached, and the moment you decided to stop playing.
Next: what it takes to get a browser game through a CrazyGames submission.