Face the challenge of the tower of Slick Wizardry in Toss Up Tower! The master of this tower dropped his Orb while pondering, and its up to you to cast bounce spells to launch the Orb all the way back up the tower. But be warned, climbing the tower is no small task! Only those who are masters of patience, and slick tricks will be able to make it to the top of the tower.

A GAME FOR FICTIONAL CONSOLE

Toss Up Tower was a game jam project made for the Super Indie City Konsole (S.I.C.K.) Game Jam. The jam was run by Indie City Games with an inperson showcase.
The SICK jam event was inspired by projects like UFO 50 that aimed to create modern games with retro constraints. All games made had the constraints of using a single color pallete, and able to be run on a low-spec Raspberry PI device.
The top 10 jam entries would be invited to show off their games at Night City with their games running on the physical SICK systems. Toss Up Tower ranked 5th out of 28 submissions, and was showcased live at the gallery event!

DESIGN GOALS

Toss Up was a solo project that I worked on along side my college capstone project Dungeon Mole as a highly scoped project. When approaching the idea of making a game inspired by 80's and 90's consoles, my mind went to old school platformers. Typically a lot of these games were super short, and super difficult to stretch out playtime. This would aid in a scoped project, and fit the constraints of the jam well. At the time, I recently played Bennet Foddy's Getting Over It, which I admired for its approach to difficult platforming and wanted to apply some of the lessons learnt in this project. Main ideas were keeping a calming atmosphere, never framing the players failures in negative conotations, and using level design to pace said failues.
Sound was a huge tool to establish the first point of keeping a calming atmosphere. The music was kept simple, slow, and serene. Players responded very well to this, and voiced their appreciation for such a simplisting and calming melody to play along to.
Regaring the point on not pointing out failures, in Getting Over It, Foddy would interject and give a quote on how failure isn't bad. While I never felt mocked or put on the spot for my failures in that game, I wanted to maintain the moments of lighthearted messaging without bringing in the topic of progression. This led to the idea of adding the slime NPC's that have small dialogue boxes with instructions, encouraging messages, and lighthearted bits to add a bit of comic relief. No where does the game acknowledge when they fall, which I believe aided in the players mood during the game.
Lastly when aproaching the level design, Foddy and similar games tend to break up the singular map into sections that have a large safety net at their base. While there is still room to fall between typically these are harder to fall through unintentionally. This is contrasted

INDIE CITY MIXTAPE & TOSS UP TOWER DELUXE

In 2026, Indie City Games approached and offered to include Toss Up Tower in their upcomming project: The Indie City 2026 Mixtape! This is a collection of a handful of games made for a variety of game jams hosted by Indie City, to be released on Steam. With the inclusion of Toss Up Tower, not only did I fix some of the issues of the original jam version, I also added an aditional 100 meter stretch beyond the tower to act as a victory lap, including a new mechanic that will send you flying into the stary skys above! This version will be exclusive to the Indie City Mixtape, so go to the Steam page now and wishlist it!