Retro Inspired: Tricky Towers
It looks like a multiplayer spin on Tetris, but there’s a lot more to Tricky Towers than first meets the eye, as Joram Rafalowicz reveals
Discover how this competitive indie release has ties to both Warioware and Tetris
If it wasn’t for Super Rare Games sending us a Switch review copy of Tricky Towers we’d have never been aware of this charming competitive puzzler. We only needed a few plays to realise how much fun it is, and it came as something as a surprise to learn that Tricky Towers made its debut in 2016. It was an even bigger surprise that its origins go back further and, despite its Tetris sheen, has ties to an old Wii game.
“It all started in 2007 with a minigame called ‘Block Star’ in Warioware: Smooth Moves!,” reveals Joram Rafalowicz, the creative director and cofounder of Weirdbeard Games. “You had to stack a couple of blocks on a platform and keep it balanced by holding the Wiimote on the palm of your hand. We really liked that minigame, but it was quite short, so we wondered what would happen if you could just keep on stacking, building a tower.” That pondering led to the team creating a flash game called 99 Bricks the following year, which was then updated for mobile in 2014 as 99 Bricks Wizard Academy.
Of course, the most obvious thing you’ll think of is Tetris, as Tricky Towers features similar looking visuals and has you rotating shapes as they drop downwards so that you can fit them as neatly as possible at the base of your tower. “That’s a comparison a lot of people make!” exclaims Joram when we mention the similarity to him. “Actually, tetrominoes are all the shapes you can make with four blocks and they are just a great fit for building. We did experiment with different shapes, but they never worked as well as the tetrominoes.”
Despite the familiar look and mechanical similarities to Tetris, Tricky Towers is very much its own game and revolves around competing wizards trying to best their opponent via three distinct modes: Race, Survival and Puzzle, although there’s also single‑player trials for those that like to go it alone. According to Joram, all three were challenging to implement, but one evolved more than the others. “It was actually the first mode we started developing, Survival,” he admits. “The rules were based on our previous game 99 Bricks Wizard
Academy: drop three bricks and it’s game over. So in multiplayer it became a mode where you could play until you dropped three bricks and the player with the highest tower won, but this felt really strange. You could be out first, but still win
with the highest tower.” Solving Survival proved quite, ahem, tricky and the team added a second win condition, which Joram feels “added some extra pressure to advanced players to build quickly and it balanced out quite nicely”.
While Tricky Towers’ mechanics will certainly win you over, it’s the charming retro‑style visuals that you’ll likely notice first. Many indie developers are either making their games pixel‑based or copying older styles and Weirdbeard is no different. “It was a natural fit to go with a cute retro style,” admits Joram,
“it evokes pleasant childhood memories for a lot of people, and is also very fitting for the atmosphere and general feel we wanted for the game.” Still, for all its great looks and solid mechanics, it’s the competitive play that’s the main focus of Tricky Towers and as you might have expected, it came with a number of challenges for the team, with the online side being a particularly tough nut to crack. “We knew from the beginning we wanted to include online multiplayer, so we tried to incorporate it into our technical design, but as production continued, the online part introduced more and more complicated edge cases,” admits Joram. “And this was not about in‑game – the online game code is quite straightforward – all the complexity was in the game flow. Things like determining the winner at the end, but when just before the match ended a player disconnects. To set up a system that can handle all these edge cases was the biggest technical hurdle for us.”
Those difficulties continued as focusing on multiplayer gaming is very different to catering for solo games. “As a designer you have less control of the player experience, because other players can do strange things,” confirms Joram. “In Tricky Towers we have quite good control of this, because players only interact with each other via spells – but even so, you need to think about what happens in a four‑player game if every player shoots off a spell at the same time. Chaos. Chaos is what happens,” he laughs.
The most recent version of Tricky Towers is on Nintendo’s Switch and it’s largely the same experience as it is on other platforms. “The main changes for the Switch version were making sure the interface and UI were all updated to be as smooth and comfortable as possible for Switch players,” explains Joram. “The game itself is a natural perfect fit for the Switch!” Which leads us back to that original copy from Super Rare Games. How did that particular collaboration come about? “They reached out to us after we released Tricky Towers on Nintendo Switch,” concludes Joram. “After some discussion, it was decided that a collector’s edition of Tricky Towers would be a great thing to create! We knew there were fans of the game who had been asking us for Tricky Towers on Switch, and we were sure that they would love the chance to own a limited edition physical copy of the game!” Even if you can’t get your hands on said copy, you certainly won’t be disappointed with a digital version.