Falling Tower
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| Animated GIF of the Falling Tower gimmick in action. | |||||||||||||||||||||
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The Falling Tower is a gimmick in Mega Man 5, found in the fourth stage of Proto Man's Castle. It is a tower with very little support, leaving itself very susceptible to collapsing.
The Falling Tower was first made available in the devkit for Make a Good Mega Man Level 2, where it appeared in the Pit of Pits sub-levels "Fragile Tower", "Rise to the Challenge.", and "Towerfall". It returned in Make a Good Mega Man Level: Episode Zero for the levels Vertical Hunger and Vertical Vine Venture, and in the Make a Good 48 Hour Mega Man Level entries Water Park Sup, Flower Core, and Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmoon Base.
Falling Towers returned in Make a Good Mega Man Level 3, and appeared in the entries Rec Man and Underground Runaround, as well as the NEO Pit of Pits sublevels "Do You Even Lift Off", "Four Steps", and "Hazardous Locomotion", and the Shrine of Nebula room "Windy & Ripply Deck".
Behavior
The Falling Tower requires support from certain objects (such as the dedicated FallingTowerStop object or a Darkman Block) to remain stationary. If there is no object present to support it (regardless of whether it was destroyed or wasn't there to begin with), it will fall until it reaches an object that can support it, or until it reaches the top of the screen. Though intended to be used as a crushing hazard, it can also be used to create slow elevator rides similar to the one near the end of Gyro Man's stage.
The Falling Tower has five creation code values:
- myTile - The tile layer that is affected by the Falling Tower. The layer selected will not be the layer that falls when the tower has no support, but rather the layer that will remain stationary while the rest of the tiles fall. Default layer is 10.
- additionalTile - How many additional tile layers are affected by the Falling Tower, in ascending order starting with the layer above what has been selected in myTile (for example, setting this to 2 with a myTile value of 10 will result in the Falling Tower affecting layers 10, 11, and 12). This value allows animated tiles to work with the Falling Tower. Default value is 0.
- setCamera - Decides whether or not the Falling Tower will change the section boundaries and attach itself to the camera. Default value is true.
- spd - How fast the tower falls when not held up. Default value is 8.
- blockObject[#] - Decides what objects will stop the tower from falling, with the # replaced with a number. The default instances of this value are "blockObject[0] = objDarkmanBlock" and "blockObject[1] = objFallingTowerStop".
The Falling Tower object can also be flipped upside down to make the tiles move up instead of down when no support is provided.
