Parking Towers
October 21–31, 2021
Solo Project by Tristan Durocher
Parking Towers is a hectic 2D platformer with a silly theme. Climb towers and dodge crazy cars. Grab powerups to improve your jumps. Survive the Parking Towers!
This game was made as a school project for the Independent Video Game Design Program at Dawson College.
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Like most 2D platformers, the player can move horizontally and jump. They have access to a wall jump and, once they collect powerups, aerial jumps.
Movement
Wall jumps, wheeeeee!
Aerial jumps, wahoo!
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The player must avoid spikes and cars. On contact with either, the player dies and returns to the last checkpoint.
Obstacles
The pink spikes are evil and will try to fall on you.
No one in this town knows how to drive.
Cars are destroyed on contact with walls, spikes or other cars. They are also destroyed when anything touches their windshield, including the player. However, this is difficult for the player to do intentionally because of the slippery controls.
Automobiles have many natural predators.
Areas of Growth
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Make UI obvious using size, contrast, position or other elements. Many players did not notice the "Wings" UI powerup.
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Always consider screen size as it relates to mechanics. Once the player had multiple jumps, they were able to move multiple screen widths without ever touching the ground. As a result, the player could not see many relevant obstacles, which created arbitrary difficulty and made many level designs impossible. This could be fixed by reducing the player's movement speed or number of jumps, or by giving the player a way to zoom out.
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Other Improvements
Make checkpoints visible. This gives the player more feedback and a clear short-term goal.
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Tighten controls or reduce difficulty of precision challenges. The controls of Parking Towers are quite slippery, and yet the player is often challenged to navigate narrow gaps or timeframes. This results in a difficulty curve that is steeper than I would like in hindsight.