Building a 100-Floor Tower Alone
The story behind Tower Trials · 5 min read
Tower Trials is a solo project — one person, no studio, no team of artists or writers handing off pieces to assemble, built in Godot. That's not a marketing angle, it's just the actual scope of the thing, and it shapes almost every decision in the game.
By the numbers
- 1 developer
- 100 floors, 6 difficulty tiers
- 140+ distinct enemies
- 5 archetypes, each a genuinely different deck
- 20 narrative chapters, one every 5 floors
Why a hundred floors
A roguelike deckbuilder lives or dies on whether the climb still feels different on run twenty. The honest answer for why the Tower has a hundred floors, six difficulty tiers, and a bestiary that runs past 140 distinct enemies isn't some grand design philosophy — it's that repetition is the thing that kills this genre fastest, and the only way to fight it as a solo dev is to just build more content than feels reasonable for one person to build.
The story nobody has to notice
There's a full narrative running underneath the card combat — one beat every five floors, twenty chapters, recurring characters you cross paths with on the way up, and a central mystery that doesn't resolve until floor 100. Most players climbing for the deckbuilding will probably never read a word of it, and that's fine. It's there for the ones who do.
Why the monetization is boring on purpose
Free to play, one ad after each floor and on death, one $1.99 purchase that turns ads off forever. No energy timers, no loot boxes, nothing pay-to-win. That's a deliberate reaction to a lot of what mobile gaming has become — the goal was a monetization model a player could forget was even there, not one built to extract as much as possible before someone quits.
The first pre-order
The moment that actually stuck, more than any of the planning above: checking analytics the morning after the app cleared Apple's review and seeing a single pre-order. Not a friend, not family — nobody I know had even heard the app existed yet. Just a stranger who found it on their own and decided it was worth a tap. First game, solo dev — that one number did more for the motivation to keep going than anything else so far.
Climb the Tower yourself
Get Tower Trials on iOS