Simtower And Its Clones

SimTower is a videogame for DOS that originated as an elevator simulator that eventually turned into a game that became moderately popular in Japan. It was developed by Yoot Saito but it was published in North America by Maxis, who also published A-Train and 3D pinball for Windows XP (and of course the developers of most Sim titles including SimCity and The Sims).

SimTower (known as The Tower in Japan) was so popular that it spawned a sequel that was released by Sega in North America called Yoot Tower (it was called The Tower II in Japan and published by Yoot's own company). It also spawned ports to the GameBoy advanced, Nintendo DS, and iPad. There have been numerous clones of it that all go after different focuses including Corporation Inc, Tiny Tower, Dream Heights, VegasTowers, OceanTower, and a few open source projects.

I have been involved with the majority of the open source clones of SimTower since 2008 and I have made a full graphics pack (minus most animations) for such a project. Most of the projects only used a small fraction of the art I made and one (which was the most promising) made animations for my art and high quality graphics for a few rooms I had not done. That was called Highrise Developer but it won't run on 64 bit computers or using the latest libraries.

However, I started work on a new, browser-based SimTower clone called OcramTower around June and last committed to it around late August. I started back up on working on it but I need a better understanding of a few things before I can publish the next version. I want to fix the way that rooms are loaded and displayed, which should fix the lobbies.

Here is the 3rd prealpha release (hosted on GitHub) of the game:
http://azemocram.github.io/OcramTower/OcramTower-prealpha3.html

 

I am trying to rewrite the code for the game to make it load info on the rooms stored in XML (so far successful) and then being able to place them into the environment and store them in an array similar to the array used in prealpha3, except prealpha4 will store room data and prealpha3 is merely an image array.
Here is a video I made a while ago demonstrating what I want the end product to look like:



Here is a video I made this week demonstrating what I want prealpha4 to look like:



So, what do you think?

--Ocram

 

I have just made a new commit to GitHub here http://azemocram.github.io/OcramTower/

One problem is that Windows uploaded the pictures with different capitalization than it displayed and that made me rewrite parts of my code to account for the wrong capitalization.

--Ocram

 

IsoTower has been completely recoded and will get all new art (or rather slightly modified versions of the concept art of Alpha). I can't wait to buy the Beta!

SomaSim, the creators of 1849 started working on Project Highrise, which looks really promising and should be released sometime this year.