Tower Trouble

Welcome to Tower Trouble!

Dive into the enchanting world of Tower Trouble, a fast-paced, 2 vs 2 party game where magic meets mayhem. Join forces with a friend, or face off against them, in this ultimate battle of wits and reflexes. In Tower Trouble, your mission is clear: defend your tower and destroy your opponent's. Harness the power of magically imbued boulders to assault enemy fortifications while conjuring defenses to protect your own.

Experience high-intensity gameplay where quick thinking and coordination are key. The action is relentless, requiring you to make split-second decisions that can either lead to spectacular destruction or monumental saves. Accompanied by magical music, the game’s satisfying visual and auditory destruction ensures that every match ends on a thrilling note.

Perfect for game nights, Tower Trouble offers simple controls that are easy to learn but challenging to master, making it accessible to players of all skill levels.

Download the build here. Tower Trouble is a 2v2 experience played with dual stick controllers.

For a more in-depth overview of the development process, take a look at our devlogs on itch.io.

About the team

Our team came together for the Game Projects course at Digital Arts and Entertainment and consisted of:

Alexander Verbruggen - Technical Artist (socials)
Wiktor Kosinski - Artist (artstation, linkedIn)
Yenzo Devos - Programmer (linkedIn)
Alexander Terentyev - Programmer (linkedIn)
And my good self, serving as the technical sound designer (portfolio).

Real-Time Destruction, Reactive Foliage and Hat Physics

The destruction of the tower is handled in real time with the chaos system in Unreal Engine. The way we keep track of the tower's health was devised by our technical artist, Alexander Verbruggen.

This was the proof of concept he made during prototyping:

He did a breakdown of this and more on his own rookies entry, you can check it out right here. In the final build, Alexander's system was translated to C++ code by me.

Concepting and the Towers Themselves

The towers and most of the concepting were done by our other artist, Wiktor Kosinski. We wanted clear contrast in the shape language of the two towers, rounded vs angular, negative space vs filled shapes...
But, we also didn't want to go with the straightforward theme of red for chaos and blue for order, keeping the themes for each side morally ambiguous.

Adaptive Music in Metasounds

For the scale of this project it was decided that we'd not be touching middleware and use the native tools of Unreal Engine. The most exciting implementation in this project was the adaptive score - the music evolves with the different phases of the game, adding percussion from phase two onward and ending in a grand finale when victory is won for either Order or Chaos. The graph also handles re-orchestration, selecting different variations of each musical phrase and which instruments to play at random.
Here you can see the graph the in action:

Credit: Quest for the Golden Chalice - Michael Andrew MacLennan, Zone Music Ltd

Thank you very much for checking out our game,

We hope you have magical time with it!
The Artificium Arcanum team

Gameplay Footage