Toppling Towers

Hi, I am about two weeks from completing this and now looking for a publisher.

The game is called "Toppling Towers", it is based on the popular Hasbro "Jenga" game, the players must remove blocks from the tower and place them on the top, the player who knocks down the tower is the loser.

The game features ODE physics and is mouse controlled for up to six players. I have various backgrounds, block sets and sound/music.

I now just need to tweak the controls/difficulty and add the last bits of logic that enforce the rules.



DEMO (1.74Mb):
http://www.apaj15.dsl.pipex.com/TopplingTowers.zip

CONTROLS:

Select a block with the mouse and press the left mouse button to grab it, you can then pull/push it with the mouse.

Hold the right mouse button to rotate the camera and if you have a block grabbed you can raise/lower it.

Use the cursor keys to rotate the block.

Press the left mouse button again to drop the block.

The mouse wheel zooms the camera in/out.

Press the space bar to reset the tower.

3rd PARTY CREDITS:

JV-ODE Physics Wrapper.
Bouncer's BloomFilter.
SSwift's Shadow System.
Rogue Vector Skybox.

Fun stuff! I love this game IRL, but here it's more challenging having to yank blocks out rather than tapping a block in and pulling it out. Challenging and easy to try again without bothering with a TRY AGAIN screen. :D

Nice game. Good luck! Maybe try to rotate the ckeckerboard plates randomly (in 90 degs steps of course) so the texture looks non-repetive, but this is only polish stuff.

Thanks guys, jfk: I will alter the texture to make it less repetive.

Is it worth considering copyright issues with the original Jenga game?

Cool! Actually, I was thinking of making something exactly
like this! :P

If you end up with one single block on top of another single one, it will continue to jitter until they all fall off.

Friggin eck now all my project ideas are coming out....
Did one of you guys HAXXOR my puter???

Meh.

Well anyway, this is sweet :D

Hah! Beat that :D

Edit:
Unless someone can beat this, I am the Jenga king.


Got one more block out before that one tumbled :)

(I stacked the ones I removed on top).

wow, you guys are pretty good. You are supposed to stack the ones you remove on top, but that rule is not enforced on this demo yet. New demo soon.

I see now why you wanted to be able to cast shadows on rotated receivers. :-)

Funny shadows glitch.
Yes, I still have this on my computer. In fact, it's on my desktop.
I placed a block at the top of the tower then reset. The shadow from that block going on to the one below it remained present from then on.

I had that, but it cleared when I picked up a block (presumably the one that originally cast the shadow).

In all seriousness, you are probably going to have a hard time doing so -- since this is so obviously based on a real-life copyrighted game, there would be all kinds of licencing issues to be resolved first...
Most publishers would steer clear of a situation like that.

The copyright issue maybe a problem, but in the shops there are lots of different 3rd party copies of Jenga, there just called things like tension tower, etc...

the game jenga AFAIK is based on a much older game frmo Syria... Towers of Babylon etc... You could probably even call it that. Just not Jenga.

The game has been around for more than 60 years. The idea is very old. No company has a copyright on jenga... just the name.

RZ

Better add more special actions and things that can't occur in real life since plain tower blok pulling wouldn't seem very appealing to buy even though it's so fun... Something strategic. Perhaps some blocks can effect something more than others, and towers come in many shapes?

>The copyright issue maybe a problem, but in the shops >there are lots of different 3rd party copies of Jenga, >there just called things like tension tower, etc...

There's no such thing as (C) on ideas and concepts. Jenga will be a trademark but that's it.

Copyright can be applied to images, words, music etc. Not concepts.

Could you please explain that to the people who have the tetris license? :)

Tetris was conceived by the russian military to train soldiers to act quickly.

Is that a joke? http://vadim.www.media.mit.edu/Tetris.htm

I used to have a game called "Tumbledown" which bore a striking resemblance to Jenga.

...Ahh, here--have a look:
http://www.marksg.com/giantgames/jenga.htm

Doesn't look like copyright was a problem for them. However, maybe you'll have some success selling it to Hasbro as a computer version of Jenga. Just a thought.