Inspiration
The Disco Tower, once a place of music and joy, is now under the control of evil AI robots who want to replace humanity. What was once a glowing beacon of dance and creativity is now a dark, cold fortress filled with machines trying to erase human art. Climb the tower and out-dance the robots to prove the greatness of human creativity and dance moves!
I always liked playing games like Dance Dance Revolution and Just Dance where you have to keep the beat, so I implemented the beat-matching pattern into a 2D exploration game. The background song is catchy and once you get into the rhythm it becomes super fun! Also, if you plug in a dance pad you can set it to control the arrow keys, so you could literally dance your way to the top of Disco Tower!
What it does
Disco Tower is a roguelike rhythm game that takes the core elements of an exploration game, and adds a beat-matching rhythm to it. Your actions are most effective when in sync with the beat, and keeping up your combo by moving around is critical to beating the harder levels! You can explore the dungeon, equip new items, defeat robots, and find the teleporter to move up to the next floor. The tower is procedurally generated, so every single game is different! Each robot also has their own movement patterns that you can strategize around. Even if you're entering a room full of robots, you can still destroy them by using good timing! There are a variety of weapons and armor upgrades to collect, and killing robots awards you with scrap metal.
How we built it
I wrote the program in TypeScript and used HTML5 Canvas as the rendering engine. I used Phaser for the texture and sprite handling. The tower levels are procedurally generated. I drew some of the assets myself and used some from online. Most of the audio is sourced from other video games.
Challenges we ran into
Procedurally generating the levels was difficult and required a lot of tweaking to get right. Also, I had to draw a lot of textures myself since I couldn't find any that I liked. This was also my first time using Phaser, so I struggled a lot with some of the simpler aspects of just getting a game running.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
I think the procedurally generated tower and field-of-view were pretty cool. Also, getting everything synced with the beat makes for a really fun experience! The robot system also is very rich, with each robot having their own stats and movement patterns which is super fun to figure out!
What we learned
This was my first time making a game, so I learned a lot about the game process, including scene lifecycles, handling textures and assets, properly handing animations and tilemaps, and more.
What's next for Disco Tower
In the future I hope to flesh out the content and add more items, enemies, and other cool features like shops. Also, I would want to make each level a bit more unique since right now they're all pretty similar
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