I'm not building this game. Steal it.

I don’t have the time, motivation, energy or muse to finish this myself. Sitting on a folder of design docs while life eats the calendar feels worse than just releasing the idea into the air. So here’s the next best thing, dumping the whole thing into the world.

If you find it, love it, and somehow ship it, cool. If you make bank on it I will appear in your comments with a lawyer and a meme. (Ideas aren’t copyrightable. The vibe is.)

Working title: TOWER.

The pitch

Towers of unknown origin appear across Earth. Anyone nearby when they activate gets pulled inside. The only way out is up.

You wake on Floor 1 as a nameless survivor. A status window greets you. No cutscene. No tutorial speech. No chosen-one speech. You are nobody, and that is the point.

TOWER is a first-person open-world action RPG. Each floor is a self-contained procedurally generated world, its own biome, weather, camps, bosses, and a hidden exit portal. There is no map. Ever. You climb by exploring, surviving, crafting, fighting, and remembering.

One hundred floors. Ten sections. One tower.

Think Solo Leveling / Tower of God power fantasy, but you’re inside it. Fog in your face, blind corners, mana flames in the dark, and a portal you have to find with your eyes and your gut.

Why this exists

Most tower / manhwa-inspired games are top-down, isometric, or side-scroll. The fantasy people actually want is immersion, the weight of being trapped somewhere that does not care if you understand it.

Four things I kept coming back to:

1. Exploration over corridors. Floors are worlds, not dungeon hallways.
2. Tension through consequence. Death costs time and progress, not your soul.
3. Systems depth. Progression is layered, not just bigger numbers.
4. Atmosphere first. Dark, grounded, immersive. Sparse NPCs. Environmental lore. No theme-park chatter.

The loop

Enter a floor. Orient yourself. Find a camp. Scout. Fight or sneak. Harvest. Craft. Hunt the boss when you’re ready, or flee if you’re not. Find the portal. Climb.

Then do it again, smarter.

A thorough floor should take about 15-30 minutes. Cleared floors stay unlocked for the run so you’re not punished for curiosity. Enemies and resources still respawn when you revisit, backtracking is farming and puzzle-hunting, not a victory lap through empty rooms.

The world

100 floors, grouped into 10 sections of 10. Each section has a fixed biome theme: forest, swamp, caverns, volcanic, tundra, corrupted ruins, arcane wastes, abyssal depths, shattered realm, then the Spire. Biome order stays fixed so crafting and materials stay coherent across runs.

Each floor has camps (safe zones, merchants, rest, sparse hunters from other towers), points of interest, a handcrafted boss arena you can freely enter and leave, and the portal somewhere in the world, hidden, no marker. Plus a chance at unique monsters that may never appear twice the same way.

Weather is not wallpaper. Rain messes with sound. Fog messes with sight. Heat and wind change how you move and shoot. The world plays you back.

No map

This is deliberate.

Early game you navigate by memory, landmarks, and a utility spell called Entity Reveal. It paints nearby things as mana flames. Red for enemies, green for friendlies, grey for neutrals, white for items and yellow for resources once you’ve got the mastery. From section 3 you can craft or buy a Portal Compass, direction only, never a waypoint.

You never get a minimap. You get tools that make you a better hunter.

Combat

Real-time first-person: melee, ranged, magic, stealth. More Skyrim than Souls. Accessible without being shallow.

Heavy weapons break stance through poise, vulnerability is the reward, not artificial bonus damage. Elemental weaknesses exist but with no UI icons. Forest things burn, ice things melt, you observe and adapt. Stealth is universal: armour weight, light, cover, weather. First hit from stealth hits hard.

Bosses are multi-phase and telegraphed, never one-shot killers. Death is a lesson. Until late New Game+ you can walk out of the arena, scout, craft counters, come back prepared. Retreat is strategy, not shame.

Progression

You level from XP like a normal RPG. That’s the floor.

On top of that, skills level through use. Fireball, stealth, sword, whatever you actually do. Deep use unlocks mastery alterations, a permanent fork (Fireball becomes Chain or Concentrated Nova). One path. Choose. First hit with a new weapon type creates its mastery skill. Sword and greatsword don’t share a brain.

At Floor 50 there’s the Goddess’s Altar, irreversible class promotion. Keep your base skills, gain a new identity. Also the only place for alteration respec, for Tower Coins. One deliberate checkpoint for rebuilds.

Three starting classes at launch. More as post-launch packs if someone actually builds this.

Economy & crafting

One currency: Tower Coins. Auto-looted from kills, plus milestone payouts once per playthrough (discover a POI, clear a floor, beat a boss). Physical loot still sits on the ground until you pick it up.

Crafting is biome-locked on purpose. You go back to earlier sections because the swamp has what the volcano doesn’t. Cross-floor puzzle items are guaranteed somewhere in their hinted section, no quest marker, no journal ping. Item text is cryptic and directional. Your memory is the quest log.

Upgrades go +1 to +9. Failure degrades one level, never destroys. No durability grind.

Death without cruelty

Die, see which checkpoint you’re rolling back to, reload that floor. Character power stays (level, skills, gear, coins, titles). World state resets. You lose time and position, not your build. Tension without cruelty.

NG+ after Floor 100 stacks fixed modifiers: harder enemies, fewer mid-checkpoints, no fleeing arenas, less safe camps, rarer ingredients, elite modifiers. Same character. Same save slot. Continuation, not a soft reset of identity.

Tone

Sparse. Atmospheric. Nobody lives in the tower by choice.

Lore comes from item text, abandoned camps, murals, notes from previous hunters, and rare encounters with dimensional merchants, other climbers, and a recurring figure called the Tower Administrator. Aware of you, not explained, gone before you can make it a friendship.

Green-flame hunters can turn hostile if you push them. The tower is not a safe social hub. It’s a vertical wilderness with occasional people who also want out.

Who it’s for

Manhwa / manga readers who want to be in the tower, not watch a UI climb for them. Action RPG players who like systems, exploration, and buildcrafting. Roguelite-curious players who want consequence without wipe-your-save sadism.

If anyone picks this up: PC first, itch demo to Steam Early Access to full 100 floors. Premium purchase. Class pack DLC later.

What done looks like

1. Demo. Floors 1-10 polished. Prove the loop.
2. Early Access. Sections 1-3 (floors 1-30). Core systems solid.
3. 1.0. All 100 floors, NG+, Goddess’s Altar, three launch classes.
4. Post-launch. Additional class packs.

Engine of record in the design docs was Unity 6 / C#. That’s an implementation detail, not a religion. The game is the fantasy and the systems.

The hook

Put the tower fantasy in first person at open-world fidelity. Hide the exit. Make weather matter. Make memory a skill. Let players flee bosses until the tower stops allowing it. Level skills by using them. Force a class rebirth halfway up. Never give a map.

If that doesn’t make something in you lean forward, this isn’t your game. If it does, you already understand the pitch.

Open source of vibes

I’m putting this out because holding onto it felt worse. If you’re a designer, programmer, composer, or chaotic good collaborator and this lights something up: take the bones. Build a prototype. Argue with the pillars. Rename it. Ship something with fog and mana flames and a portal you have to find.

If you somehow ship the exact game and get rich: buy me coffee, credit the design doc era, and pretend we planned this all along.

Working title stays TOWER until something better earns the name.

Climb carefully. There is no map.