TowerFall

TowerFall is an archery combat platformer for up to four players, a single-screen local multiplayer game in which players control archers who attempt to kill one another with bows and arrows or by stomping on each other’s heads.¹⁷⁷ Created by Matt Thorson — later known as Maddy Thorson? — it was first released exclusively on the Ouya? microconsole on June 25, 2013, before being expanded and ported to other platforms as TowerFall Ascension.⁴⁷¹⁰ The game pairs simple, accessible mechanics with deep competitive play, and has been favorably compared to Super Smash Bros.?.¹³ It is best played competitively with friends, as the developer puts it, “cross-legged on the floor within punching distance of each other”.¹⁷

The core combat centers on a strict economy of ammunition: each archer begins a round with only a few arrows, which persist in the game world and can be retrieved from walls or the bodies of fallen foes by any player, making careless shooting risky.¹¹¹⁷ Because arrows are scarce, the design discourages camping and keeps players in constant motion as they scavenge spent shots.¹¹ Arrows seek lightly toward opponents, a deliberate concession meant to give players more leeway and reinforce the fantasy of being a master archer from the outset.¹⁷¹² Players can dodge in eight directions on the ground or in the air, and dodging an incoming arrow at the precise moment it arrives allows an archer to snatch it out of the air; the dodge can also function as a second jump, leaving the player briefly vulnerable afterward.⁷¹¹ The only way to kill an opponent in the middle of a dodge is to leap onto their head, which encourages a race for the high ground.¹¹

Maps wrap around so that a player leaving one side reappears at the opposite edge, making the screen’s borders as important to watch as the area immediately around one’s character.¹¹ Chests scattered through the stages yield power-ups such as explosive darts, wall-piercing drill arrows, bouncing laser arrows, shields, and magical wings.¹¹¹¹⁷ Dozens of adjustable variables let players tailor and save custom match types, from the number of starting arrows to the power-ups that spawn; saved configurations can be stored to one of three slots.¹ At the end of each match the game rewinds and shows an instant replay of the final kill, which can be saved as an animated GIF and which lets newcomers study the victor’s technique.¹¹⁷

Development

TowerFall originated at the Full Indie Game Jam in Vancouver in June 2012, where Thorson and a team that included composer Alec Holowka? had 48 hours to build a game around the idea of shooting arrows.¹²³ It began as a single-player Flash game intended to make the player feel like a master archer; Thorson deliberately removed the charge-up mechanic common to archery games, made arrows seek slightly toward targets, and limited aiming to eight directions to simplify snap decisions.¹² The earliest concept, inspired by The Legend of Zelda, was a single-player platformer in which a chubby archer climbs a tower, dying and retrying, before facing a boss at the top.³ The pair planned to add a range of weapons, but the first one they coded, the bow and arrow, felt so good that they went no further.³ After the jam, Thorson prototyped a multiplayer version that tested far better, and multiplayer gradually took over the project to become the game’s defining mode.¹²³

Thorson later identified several competition games as influences on the mechanics: the arrow-catching was drawn from the item-catching in Super Smash Bros. Melee, the arrow-shooting recalled egg-throwing in Yoshi’s Island, the one-hit kills and heightened tension came from Bushido Blade, and the emphasis on battlefield positioning from Team Fortress 2.¹² He took the playful, goofy tone from GoldenEye 64, wanting TowerFall not to take itself too seriously, an attitude reflected in its variants and match-end awards.¹² The medieval setting of stone-walled castles and lava-filled dungeons was chosen as a companion to the arrow mechanic and was inspired in part by the Game of Thrones book series, which Thorson was reading at the time and which led him to make the characters realistic archers rather than wizards.¹²²² Each archer was given a unique title hinting at a backstory, and Thorson intended to develop that lore further, at one point planning to confine it to an old-school NES-style instruction manual before considering a single-player campaign instead.¹²

The game was developed in part within “Indie House,” a three-bedroom home in the Vancouver suburb of Richmond, British Columbia, that Thorson shared with Holowka, Noel Berry, Hannah Boyd, and Chevy Ray Johnston.³⁶ Holowka, who joined as co-designer after a visit from Winnipeg, suggested that without a steady stream of housemates and visitors to play it, Thorson might never have made the game multiplayer at all.⁶ Holowka later left the co-designer role to let Thorson lead the project, but contributed the music.³⁴ Graphics were by Studio Miniboss and sound by Power Up Audio.⁴ Thorson had been making games since the late 1990s, when his mother helped him find the Game Maker software, and by college in 2006 he was paying his tuition and rent with browser-game contracts; TowerFall became his first commercial standalone game.⁶

Release and ports

Ouya? secured a six-month exclusivity window in exchange for development funding, a deal arranged by the console’s head of developer relations, Kellee Santiago, the former president of Thatgamecompany and a partner in IndieFund, who signed the game after a demo at PAX East.¹⁰¹² Because the $99 Ouya required an additional $50 per extra controller to enjoy the four-player mode fully, Thorson added support for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 controllers.¹²⁴ The original release sold only around 5,000 copies, but it drew critical praise and was cited by some reviewers as a reason to buy the console.¹⁰ Thorson brought the game to the Evo 2013 fighting-games tournament, where he expected high-level players to expose flaws in its competitive design but found that it held up well.¹²

TowerFall: Ascension - Launch TrailerGameSpot

In November 2013 Thorson announced an enhanced version, TowerFall Ascension, for PlayStation 4? and Windows PC, a move he described as a necessity for distributing an indie game.¹⁰ Released on March 11, 2014, Ascension added a single-player Trials mode of target-practice puzzles and a Quest mode that repurposes multiplayer stages as Horde-style wave-survival challenges for one to two players.⁷¹⁵ The new modes were promoted to Ouya owners as free additions.¹⁰ Ascension later appeared on Mac, Linux, PlayStation Vita, and, on January 25, 2017, Xbox One?, alongside a substantial Dark World expansion adding a four-player campaign, new power-ups, levels, and bosses.⁵¹¹

A Nintendo Switch version, released under the original TowerFall title on September 27, 2018, was the first on a Nintendo console and bundled the content of both the Ascension and Dark World expansions.²¹⁴ It added a six-player mode, with each stage given a slightly wider variant, and, exclusively, cameo appearances by Madeline and Badeline from Celeste?, the subsequent game by the same studio.²¹⁴ The studio was originally Matt Makes Games, later renamed Maddy Makes Games and then Extremely OK Games.¹⁶⁷

Reception

TowerFall was widely praised as a local multiplayer game, with critics emphasizing the joy of its couch play while lamenting the absence of online multiplayer.¹¹¹¹⁴ TowerFall Ascension holds a Metacritic score of 87 on PlayStation 4, based on 31 critic reviews, with EGM awarding a perfect score and calling it the best game in the PlayStation 4’s early library.¹⁵ Edge described it as among the most feature-rich of the single-screen brawlers, though it noted that watching the wrapping edges of the map could diffuse a player’s focus.¹¹ Polygon’s Griffin McElroy wrote that the game “is never not fun,” and the same outlet’s Chris Plante named it multiplayer game of the year.¹¹⁷ Kotaku called it the most fun its writer had at E3 2013, likening it to Smash Bros. bred with Spelunky or Nidhogg.⁹ The Nintendo World Report reviewer, who had reached the game through Thorson’s later Celeste, called it “complete local-multiplayer mastery” and one of his favorite local multiplayer games of all time.¹⁴