Towers - an open-world, narrative-based game

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I recently finished a fairly long game jam project for the ‘open world’ game jam* called ‘Towers,’ which is about finding towers in an open-world island landscape.

You can grab it from Itch.io at https://btsherratt.itch.io/towers.

This took me about 7 months of off-and-on solo work (with a few licensed/generated assets) and although it’s pretty buggy and sparse it’s been kind of an interesting project to work on. I wanted to explore how you might make an open-world game that relies more on environmental and coincidental storytelling, giving you an environment to explore and letting you discover various stories that belong to other people, and piecing together a potential backstory for yourself from conversational fragments. There’s no map, instead you get a bell that can be used to locate the towers using a 3D sound mechanic. There are also paths all around the island that can also be used to navigate if that doesn’t work for you. I’d say the concept is similar to making Shadow of the Colossus into a walking simulator, then removing the violence. It was also very heavily inspired by Vane.

I’m fairly happy with the game as a prototype for something larger (and more content-rich) but it’s definitely a game that I made for myself, so I wouldn’t fault anyone for finding it boring. Nonetheless, if you fancy checking it out then thanks a lot!

I also made available some of the Unity scripts that deal with the landscape and gameplay in my Unity tools repo, although they are prototypes and should not be used in anything serious:

Thanks for taking a look!

(* - Please consider joining the jam if you’re interested! The jam’s organiser, Kate, has given it a very generous time limit.)

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This sounds pretty interesting, the approach to story telling and the bell (I haven’t got it yet but didn’t play long). The idea of an open world jam is neat too! Also seems not a lot of people know about vane which had amazing visuals :smiley:

I’d find some more time to try it and get a bit further, thanks for sharing!

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Thanks for playing, it’s kind of a weird one and not for everyone but I hope it’s interesting. The video on the itch page is a mini walkthrough for the first part of the game if you did want to get to that part of the game quickly.

I met the Friend and Foe team when they exhibited Vane at Bitsummit 2015. (I was exhibiting there as well.) I’m still good friends with one of the members, they’re good people. I was disappointed the game didn’t do as well as they’d hoped, but it’s a tricky industry.