*Almost* every condo I've ever made (w/ updates!)

Note: you may have to open the videos in their own tab to get them to play.

At some point last year, Tower Unite surpassed Team Fortress 2 as my most played game ever, or, at least, game with most time verifiably logged on Steam ever. Admittedly, at least half of that was probably spent in Blender, AFK, or jetpacking in circles as I binge entire sitcoms, AND half of that other half was probably playing the actual game. Still, thousands of hours, and what to show for it?

I’ve tried my best to order these chronologically. Buckle up.


"The Ran one"

Map: Condo
April, 2016

I think the first time I ever went hopping around condos, I discovered the existence of canvases because someone had a giant mosaic of Reimu. I was floored, “WHOOAHH, BIG PICTURE WOWW”

Inspired, I decided to vomit my favorite 2hu all over the place. This is probably my first condo, I don’t even have the save for it anymore due to re-installing Windows without cloud backups, so just a screenshot remains. Nothing special here, though. It’s yellow spirit was later reborn into a Suite.


Fancy Theater

Map: Suite
2017/2018 winter

Just a compact & optimized, yet furnished theater for my friends to hang out and watch videos around the holidays. I feel like I didn’t quite have the chops to make something from scratch on smooth dirt, but the capabilities of what you could do in game weren’t nearly what they were now either.




Upstairs was empty, so of course I just blocked it off, but whenever I let strangers in, they always acted so smug because they clipped through the ceiling, as if I was trying SOOoOO hard to stop them.

Problem solved.

On the topic of ‘Suite,’ remember how this map was planned to have almost no customization? Like, no changing textures, weather, or time of day? I remember making a fuss about this, and it unintentionally lead to what I consider the funniest post on the forums:


Planet'arium

Map: Art Studio
Spring 2019

Surreal nonsense.

I think the original inspiration for this came when I saw someone else’s art studio. They filled in the space beyond the windows and had empty pockets where they made aquariums. I too wanted to make a panorama. The crown jewel here is further beyond the walls though…

Also, this one holds the honor of being the only time Mac has ever joined my condo. Here’s how that went:
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Dixie Cabin

Map: Smooth Dirt
Summer, 2019
aka “Joe Dirt”

This is the first building I ever made ‘from scratch.’ An utterly stupid combination of dixie & weeaboo

This originally started as a single big log cabin themed room to house a theater, but it quickly boiled over.


I wanted to have rustic cabin condo badly, so I just had to make it happen myself. Looking back, the structure and scale were incredibly bad.



Bare in mind, this was before canvas items had texture support from in-game materials, and were custom URL only.

I remember being nearly done and realizing I didn’t have a bathroom, so I lazily combined it with a gigantic gold safe lmao

One of my little joys with this one was watching people spawn from the top window and just observing how what they’d look at first.


The 36th Chamber

Map: Suite
August, 2019

No longer able to contain my suite as just a theater, a new yellower dwelling was born.

If you know me, you’ll know yellow is my favorite color by a huge margin. That’s that’s about as deep as this one goes.


Popsicle Zone

Map: Condo
September 2019

If you’ve ever run across a guy named Dad Shark, you can thank him for this one. I learned from one of his condos that you could copy the glass material from the retractable ceiling well before glass textures had official support, so I made an entire condo based on this.

It used to blow people away, though perhaps much less impressive now that all sorts of glasses have been added to the material list. Unfortunately it was built out of season, so I could never enter it into a winter contest, and since I never published this one, I’ve recycled a lot of it’s elements for use on other maps.

This condo also started my trend of making the Virus trophy have glowing eyes. It’s my favorite thing ever. I really hope they never change the model lol.


Wu-Tang Mining Federation

Map: Resort
September, 2019

Heavily influenced by Deep Rock Galactic, this condo is some vague fusion of space stations & subterranean lava caves.

Resort is a tough condo to tackle. Huge. Too many rooms for one person. Like a lotta folks, I sectioned off areas I wasn’t going to use, but now with thematic safety gates and tectonic collapses! Also, when an enviroment is this big, it encourages me to slap stupid memes everywhere to fill space.

Much like the ice condo, this one used to surprise people because it’s entire basis was a copyable transparent texture from the map that most people didn’t know about, in this case it was the metal grate cover for the giant fan here.

Like how smooth dirt used to suffer, some update caused everything outdoors to get bathed in bright blue moonlight, even when you try to turn it off. I can’t quite make a big deal about this in good faith just because my specific condo suffers from being about to see outside with transparent walls. However, there’s another problem with this map; workshop items here tend to become enveloped in darkness.

If I ever revisit this idea, it’d probably be built from scratch on a Smooth Dirt.


Cosmic Theater

Map: Smooth Dirt
Fall 2019

I will probably never finish a highrise condo. Too many rooms, awkward spaces, but a long time ago, I had an idea to use it for making a station on a low-orbiting moon. I never bothered beyond the outdoor scenery.

I had let someone in, and they complimented the outside, but said it was too bad how there’s nothing else. That made me realize there didn’t have to be anything else, so I moved it over to smooth dirt. Easy enough.

Before this game had official support for water textures, I had to make due with stretching out a ‘Stone Fountain Monolith’ This map took it to an extreme and covered all visible space.

Same ideas earlier; make a really well optimized venue to watch videos and make it nice to look at. You’d be surprised what a difference a new “skybox” will make (or canvas dome, in these cases.)


This one recently got reused in my Atlantis condo.


Ayyyy, look familiar??

Oh, and this happens to be just a regular skyline, just rotated 135 degrees. Neat, huh?


The D&B Abyss

Map: Smooth Dirt
Fall 2019

I started using the Cosmic Theater as a template for other decorative theater venues. This one ended up being my favorite. This condo also started a trend of me making environments based on musical sound. A lot of people think this looks like a metal album, but the inspiration was more from darkstep drum & bass.

I REALLY want to flesh this one out, but there’s been various factors outside of my control that killed my interest. There used to be the funky green light that plagued smooth dirt, but the same update that fixed this also inadvertently increased the base amount of fog, so there’s ugly blue haze on just about any smooth dirt build, and it just ruins the monochromatic look I used to have.


Same items, except 40k units in the sky, beyond the fog, but also beyond the sound of rainfall hitting the ground, sadly. I desperately crave that HDR black & white goodness.

Devs, if you’re reading, please give us a checkbox to just turn off fog 100% in the condo weather properties.

I also made a hazier snowy one to try and compensate, but it just doesn’t have the same oomph imo.


a e s t h e t i C:\ISLAND

Map: Smooth DIrt
Christmas, 2019

The final culmination of the ‘Cosmic Theater’ concept. While I was messing around with the original, someone queued Floral Shoppe and the inspiration hit instantly.

Man, this map has so many tidbits that it warrants it’s own thread.

I had done something very similar before that helped get my plans kickstarted. I’m NOT a fan of tabletop games, like, at all, but my friends are, so when I found out that Tabletop Simulator lets you simply upload image URLs for table & backgrounds, I threw these together to entertain myself whenever I attempted to play with them. I still use the board texture as the carpet for the TV area.

And this god damn can. This map is unofficially a couple years old now and I finally added something I wanted when I first made it; Raspberry Arizona on the right side.
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Of course the Green Tea’s meme status meant assets of it were readily available, but for raspberry, I wasn’t so lucky. I cut the top and bottom off one of these IRL with a dremel tool,made snips along the curved lip to properly unfold, then had it sitting under a cutting board with my Instapot on top to flatten it out, just to get a decent scan.

For a very brief moment in time, an actual Mac Tonight NPC was playing piano here, but the character is banned on sight from the workshop. Not a fan of that ruling.

Just to re-iterate how good canvas domes are, look how quickly it just looks like a bunch of junk in a field when you remove the sky and water.

Also, I can’t not talk about this in a retrospect; If you’ve explored workshop condos at all, you’ve likely run into this map. It’s currently the highest rated condo by a huge margin.
Golden Nugget 64 dice roll
Figure A: Me writing the previous sentence.

Does it deserve that spot? I’ll let you decide. Here’s what I can say, though; timing was a factor. It would never get as high as it did if I didn’t publish it within the launch window of the Workshop feature, when everyone’s eyes were beaming in that direction. I hope someday TU gets much more players, cause the average TF2 hat blows these metrics out of the water lol

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Seriously! My newest condo upload hasn’t had any new visitors in the last 2 days.

Oh, and I have a Halloween version I drag out about once a year.



Kuso Gensokyo

Map: Smooth Dirt
Early Spring 2020

A shitpost if there ever was one. Completely exhausted from concentrated effort, I wanted to slap a bunch of obxnoxious GIFs everywhere with the new sprite feature.

This was thrown together in the span of a weekend and I haven’t touched it much since. Maybe someday I’ll upload, but there’s much more to add before that will ever be the case.

If you’re not a Touhou fan, this probably won’t do much for you.


The Foxhole

Map: Smooth Dirt
aka “Dixie Cabin” (2)
November 2020

A remake of my cabin from the ground up. The goal was to be completely uncompromising, removing all laziness from the previous one; No more empty areas, or windows that take up an entire wall, or bathroom/vault fusions.

I started the outdoor scenery of this for the November 2020 “Fall” themed contest, but that one had a really weird deadline that I forgot about, in the middle of a workday day right before Thanksgiving break. R.I.P.

This condo is my baby, my absolute favorite. An artistic rendition of my happy place, if there ever was one. I wanted to take my ideal vision of “comfy” and crank it up to 11. Log cabin, rustling autumn leaves, sunset cinammon pumpkin spice soft glow, playing Animal Crossing after school, wearing-your-favorite-hoodie-on-a–windy-59*F-late-afternoon levels of cozy.

I’m about to put 90% of this community on blast to posture myself here, but I gotta get this off my chest. I HATE “secret rooms,” and I don’t simply mean rooms that are secret, no. By this, I mean shoving a miniature teleporter underneath a chair or something so you have to play Where’s Waldo by scanning every corner with a tiny potion. I never thought this was fun nor interesting.


Of all my condos, this one suffers the most from the float number rounding bug. You know, the one where guests will see the scale of non-canvas items rounded to the nearest tenth decimal? Man I hope that one gets fixed. Bugs that cause visual inconsistency between players are the bane of my existence.


Happy Birthday Zone Act 1

Map: Condo
April 2021

Finally, in the year 2021, I entered a condo contest. I had the idea of making a rainbow sherbert colored condo for a very long time. I’m a 90’s kid, I like Sonic, and Tower Unite just started it’s Anniversary event. All these elements just came together.

Not a whole lot else to say. In-and-out, this was started a nearly complete in the month of the contest. It’s right on the workshop if you wanna see more.

https://files.catbox.moe/0l9vc3.webm
(This video is a little out of date now.)

BUT, even though this was already over half a year ago, I’d like to make a shoutout to these two albums. I probably listened to both of these dozens of times while building it. Kept the juices flowing.


Can You Beat My Game? :)

Map: Smooth Dirt
Summer 2021




Note: there is no way to beat this game.

I look forward to expanding this when forced PVP and Condo IO happen.


@ l a n t i s

Map: Smooth Dirt
May 8th, 2021
AKA “E:\Den” & “w a t e r”

You may recall this from the May 2021 contest. Now, here it is, hot of the presses.

I got to work on this one almost immediately after the Sonic one. TU had a few water materials to put on canvas objects now, and by golly I was gonna put them to work.

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Basically an entire condo themed around this background decoration.

(This video is also out of date, please check out the real deal if you can!)

And the water? A 3-layer dip. A giant Evil Cauldron colored blue for that ethereal glow, with a stretched out hot tub for actual splashing and reflections, and finally the Smooth Dirt’s grass itself using the ocean material for actual tides.

I held off on releasing this for a very long time, hoping transdimensional paintings would eventually get patched to behave themselves better (they kinda still don’t, tbh) because almost everyone would pause to gander at the secret TV room portal and how it’s perspective would shift.

But I’m glad I did hold off, because I did for so long that tubes eventually got added.

Tubes.

Tubes!

TUBES TUBES TUBES TUBES TUBES TUBES TUBES TUBES TUBES TUBES TUBES TUBES


Seriously, tubes are a game changer. The state of condos in this game will now have 2 eras: Before tubes & after tubes.


Unnamed eyestrain-inducing pyramid nightclub WIP

Map: Smooth Dirt
June 2021

My “”“current”“” WIP. I got condo burn out real bad after starting this one, so it’s been progressing at glacial speed. It also doesn’t help that I hate building with triangles & non-perpendicular angles.

Seriously, this structure alone was a nightmare to build without triangles with a symmetrical, center origin.


Man, I love decorating games. Condos are practically an artistic medium in and of itself. I wish I had an actual creative process, though. I tend to have some vague ideas, throw the elements onto a map, then juggle them around for weeks/months until they look right in in terms of balance, space, color, etc.

For that, I have to commend the Tower devs, or any indie developer, really. I’m under no obligation to satisfy an audience, schedule, or copyright laws, and it still takes me forever to get something into a state where I’d be happy to irreversibly share it with the community. Who knows if I could actually make a fun map to service gameplay, but I’m hoping we eventually get official gameworld support to find out.

So that’s about it. Happy Thanksgiving, all.

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This was so much fun to browse through, definitely got some inspiration while looking at some of these pictures :)))

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Figure I’ll just keep posting here for now cause why not?

Also, I guess Catbox REALLY doesn’t like embedded videos, so again, you might have to open the webms in a new tab for them work.

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Nighthawks

Map: Smooth Dirt
December 2021

You mighta saw this from the last winter condo contest. I wanted to copy something more ambitious. So came Nighthawks, a painting that probably resonates with anyone else playing this game at 2 A.M.



What I thought was going to be a simple recreation ended up requiring tons of artistic license. To start, the building in this painting is allegedly not based on an actual location, so there’s been a lot of debate on it’s actual shape: Is the diner a square corner, or a wedge? In the end, I went with right-angle. Also the painting doesn’t show it having an entrance, so I had to decide on how to do that too.

Also, what about the rest of the scene outside of the painting? I didn’t want to make just a panorama, I was going to construct the whole block so you really felt like you’re stepping foot into it. I noticed another Edward Hopper painting, “Sunday Morning,” had buildings that were nearly identical to the background of Nightawks, so I used that as a reference to fill out the back wall.

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For the 4th wall, I ended making a fancy theater just cause I wanted something cool to look at through the gigantic window from within the diner. Ironically, it ended up being the biggest concentration if effort for this build. Doing some research, I had completely forgotten how going to the movies use to be an event that you’d dress up for.



My personal favorite part of this condo was using solid black canvas objects to create the silhoutte of buildings in the background.

This video tour is from the ‘Christmas’ version that I redecorated to enter the contest, but the only difference is a bunch of snow piles and garlands tbh.


Mango Dyson

Map: Smooth Dirt
Early 2022

Once done with Nighthawks, I was very much sick of trying to match the sophistication of a classic painting and started this not long after.

If you’ve ever played any of the Project Diva games, you know just about every song has a crazy, surreal stage for Miku to jam on. That was the main idea here; I wanted a really high-energy venue for dance music. The pyramid one in my previous post fit that bill, but I wanted something more upbeat.

One of my goals was to make it almost impossible to look somewhere without motion happening on screen.

While I was building it, I was listening to the Let’s Tap soundtrack (an ultimately plain & obscure mini-game compilation for the Wii that had a strangely fantastic OST.) My friend looked up the composer and found his side project, “Missile Chewbaca” which had us discovering one of my favorite albums I’ve heard in a while. It ended up being great inspiration for finishing this map.

The addition of the “physics-al media” item has made it so I can actually put the music I want people to listen to on the maps themselves, which makes me very happy. I’ve since updated most of my condos with a little table that has all the music that helped inspire me




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I’m currently working on whats probably going to become my new favorite.

However, I’m finding a lot of people don’t even know workshop condos exist since it’s tucked away past the main menu with no HUB access, so I don’t think I’m going to ‘officially’ publish more condos until the video store is added. Until then, I’m hoping to have a couple new ones completed for it’s grand opening : )

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Here it is, my best yet. I promised myself I’d wait for the video store to get added first, but I’ve had this one 99% finished for a couple months now and I’ve been bursting at the seams to share it.

Lunarectory

Map: Smooth Dirt
Late Spring/Summer 2022
aka “Rainbow Moon Palace” & “Lunar Lounge”

Very much inspired by dreamy games, like Klonoa, Kirby, and NiGHTS, I had ideas for this one in my back pocket for a long time, so from the get-go my goal was to make some sort of celestial, crystal gazebo with cosmic purple & rainbow accents.

The swiftfield texture normally looks like some sort of sci-fi styled holo-grid, but you can reduce the scale to zero and make it appear almost plainly solid in color depending on the shape of the canvas you put it on. I was playing with this and made some rainbow stairs, which kickstarted this whole thing.

Quickly switched from stairs to a bridge made of half-tubes.

When I started getting bored with working on the main island, I then made another bridge with a different style cuz I also wanted to have some place where you walk through all of the colors in order, rather than all of them side by side at once. The way one side had warm colors and the other side had cool colors naturally lead to a “fire & ice” theme.

From there the dichotomies in this theme exploded: fire & ice, red & blue sun & moon, hell & heaven, western & eastern.

Specifically, the western vs eastern combined with fire & ice theme was directly inspired by a level from game I played last year called FIGHT KNIGHT that might be my GOTY 2021, so please check it out too.

When 0.16.0.0 officially released, I immediately got to work with the sound emitter’s new SFX. Other than directly in the center of the main TV area, you should be able to hear some sort of ambience from anywhere you’re normally standing. Here’s what that looks like when editing:

At some point while I was working on this, @CalculatorSpoon put out this enchanted forest condo on the workshop. Please, go give that one a look cuz I’m pretty sure I might have taken the bouncy mushrooms from it, and I also think it’s one of the best looking maps on the workshop:

My personal favorite part is this clock island. I took a regular clock item and blew it up and built on top of it so it has working hands.

Also, this late after I’ve already made everything, I realized I might’ve been taking a lot from the Sonic Adventure 2 Chao lobby without consciously thinking of it lol

So yeah, that’s it. Please check it out yourself if you haven’t done so already. I’m frequently encountering tons of players have no idea that workshop condos are a feature that even exists, so if any devs are reading this, PLEEEEEASE, that video store in the condo hub cannot come soon enough.


Also, after over a year, I’ve picked up the Egyptian nightclub from the end of my first post, so I expect to finish that eventually…

I also have plans to remake the Pioneer 2 from Phantasy Star Online. This will take a long ass time.

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Takoizu / ターコイズ

Map: Smooth Dirt
April-August 2023

Takoizu” - because this game already took “Midori” for a map name. That’s right; Takoizu is just the loan word for Turqoise. Lol. Lmao.

My first completed condo in over a year. Can you believe it’s been that long? I can thank this August '23 condo contest for finally finishing one, because easily over half of the work took place after they announced that there was no rules about how old the condo could be. If you’re browsing these forums at the time of this post, you’ve probably already seen this, as it was my entry. I think I did pretty good, given the scope of competition.

This is probably the first condo that sprouted from zero initial inspiration. I had absolutely no plan when I started this. One day I was like “Fuck it, lets make a tiny something, ANYTHING” and made with a single, square room the size of Smooth Dirt’s platform.


(Pictured: earliest snapshot, only at z1,000 above Smooth Dirt’s ground.

After using a lot of “neon” (Star material), I wanted to capture the feeling a cool night drive with the cabin lit only by the minty glow of an aftermarket stereo — at least, in the form of a building. Just something that makes you FEEL cool for being there. I quickly fell into the theme of “sorta 1980’s Hi-Fi Shinjuku penthouse”.

In that regard, this canvas stereo was one of the first things I bothered making:

Once I had the idea to use the Canvas Decal item to set artwork into the paper walls, I knew I was getting somewhere.

Speaking of canvas decals, this was also my first condo using I/O too. I made this panel that switches the image on a decal to change the pattern of the billiard table’s felt.

Before I got too far along, I had considered switching to yellow/gold, but that didn’t last. I’ve had a few people suggest that I use I/O to switch to the color of everything, but we’re talking thousands of items at this point. That ain’t happening lol.

When this initial room finally started taking form, I knew it wasn’t going to remain just one. The stairs leading down to what is now the disco were added. I struggled with this area for awhile because I couldn’t decide between ‘dancefloor’ or ‘pool’ for the ultimate cheesy luxury, which is why there’s a lever to make both happen. Thanks, Condo I/O!


With that settled, I started leaning way harder into this being a music area. I’m EXTREMELY happy with this canvas jukebox I threw together. I normally just use the workshop one uploaded by @ThurDoDinok, but I had a color scheme to upkeep, so I used it as a reference to build my own.

Obviously, the illusion of the skybox was meant to make it look like you’re at the top of the skyscraper, but I found the initial dimensions to be too small to keep that up, so I eventually made the skyscraper housing around it, which was a huge general aesthetic boost as well.

After this new housing was made, I knew I wouldn’t be able to resist expanding further into moving around within this new layer, thus began two more floors; the sub-roof lobby & bottom meeting floor.


The top of the first room accidentally lined up with the last row of the outside layer that it was perfectly ruining the view of Fuji, so an entire layer of stairs were added stand over it, with a grate floor to be able to look down at the other floors.

BIG changes.

I knew in my heart that people would get annoyed about being in a skyscraper and not be able to get to the true roof, so another floor & set of stairs were born…

I probably spend a whole day tinkering with the stairs that lead to the actual roof cause I couldn’t settle on how the catwalk should be. There was a point where I was considering it wrapping around the entire building:

This bottom place was the very last thing I completed. I initially though about it being some sort of executive luxury suite before it ultimately became a big-boss Yakuza meeting room.

I took it as an opportunity to pump up the Japanese decor as hard as possible, in case the modern scenery had you forget where you were. Took a lot from the actual Yakuza games here.

Lastly, a post-contest update, I found that players tend to completely miss/ignore I/O switches if they look naturally placed, so I’ve gone through and put emphasis on every single lever and button in the game place. AAAAAAAaa


Another Fun fact, the ‘glow’ property to canvas objects was implemented in the middle of making this place and I had to adjust every one that was using the ‘Star’ material. :grinning: :gun: It’s also currently suffering from some mild texture issues in wake of the SDNL update, but some of them got repaired in the last hotfix. :pray:

Anyway, that’s pretty much it. Big thanks to:

-This random photograph by a guy named “Hikaru Inoue,” that I found on deviantArt, which I’ve been using off and on as a wallpaper for probably half my life now.

-The first Vocaloid song I ever heard, which has been infecting my mind with images of snowy Japanese skylines for a similar amount of time.

-and @Vuultz for sharing arcade artwork for Outrun.


Other stuff?

I got pretty far with remaking PSO’s Pioneer 2 that was mentioned in the previous post. Remaking a map 1:1 instead of just building something original creatively is fucking grueling, so I got tired of working on it. Will probably revisit some day because there was a lot of progress.

You know what else is grueling? Trying to come up with a pleasing open floorplan for the inside of a pyramid-shaped structure. So the Egyptian nightclub from 2 years ago is still in limbo.

I do have something I actually wanna make soon, but it’s not worth showing off yet. See you when it’s done!

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Your builds are always pretty and cool.

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god damn, those are some beautiful condos, amazing job with all of them!

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2hu enjoyer

Actually been to a few of these: the tower, dixie cabin, and vaporwave specifically.

Great work.

Well done Niz.
I’ve seen many of them as well