TIGSource Forums

---

Description It's a game about climbing. Man what more do you want from me. Features Ropes Hammers Rocks The Perseverance of Men The Thrill of Competition The Skills of Cooperation Climbing Many glorious colors		Inspired by (http://famicase.com/09/softs/49.jpg) (http://famicase.com/09/softs/49.jpg)

---

Controls

Player 1 Controls:
Z	Jump (if on the ground) or throw Rope (if in the air)
X	Hammer
Up/Down	Aim rope (if not roped) or climb rope (if roped)
Left/Right	Move (if not roped) or swing rope (if roped)

Player 2 Controls:	NOTE P2 Requires Gamepad to play!
Button 2	Jump (if on the ground) or throw Rope (if in the air)
Button 1	Hammer
Up/Down	Aim rope (if not roped) or climb rope (if roped)
Left/Right	Move (if not roped) or swing rope (if roped)

---

Download
Windows (http://dl.dropbox.com/u/428691/Climb_v2.1.zip)
Source Code (http://svn2.xp-dev.com/svn/climb/)

---

Updates!
Added some new features to the game.  They include:

• Easier!
• More relevant scoring!
• Competitive gameplay that makes sense!
• Bug fixes!
• A sign!
• Secrets!  (Two of them)
• Frontend for post game!
• Free exclamation marks with every update!!!
• Maybe more!

---

Media
Gameplay Video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MbGo1MIgZfg) --- Co-op Gameplay Video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8e9a7RzuKEQ) --- Box art (http://dl.dropbox.com/u/428691/boxart.jpg)

CLIMB THE CLIMBING CLIMB OF THE ECHELONS OF CLIMBING TO CLIMB TO THE GREATEST OF CLIMBERS, THE KING OF CLIMBING

Make it a Shadow of the Colossus clone.

Welp, cat's out of the bag now guys.

(http://faqr.org/ryan/images/CONCEPT_ART.JPG)

I almost picked this. I was gonna try something like Spelunky but going up a mountain.

So, any news on this one?

Oh hi there.
I've been working slowly at this game in C++ using SDL and Box2D.  It's coming along nicely, and I'm at a point now where the core gameplay is down.  Now it's time to tweak the controls, polish off some art and have the level generator work off a difficulty seed.  Also you'll notice the tearing in the screenshots, compliments of Blargg's NTSC libraries (http://slack.net/~ant/libs/ntsc.html#nes_ntsc).  Music is in the pipe too, with thanks to the guy who was the Audio Director for the fictitious company we made 5 or so years ago to get into E3.

---

I love that authentic "old TV" look.

Climbaliciously good, I am excited to see the game and it looks good so far.

What a fantastic title screen.

You can play my game now (http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=13422.msg400256#msg400256).
Please let me know if you find any weird behavior.
(http://dl.dropbox.com/u/428691/weird_porn.gif)

That's my quote! :) Thank you for putting that at the start, haha, it was a pleasant surprise!

EDIT: WOW THIS GAME IS HARD

I can't get past the second rung, haha

Looking at it now I probably should have quoted you.  When I do another build (inevitable)

Having made this game I've gotten pretty good at playing it (I think), but I notice watching people play for the first time that there are some elements of the control that aren't very explicit.  For example, holding up or down when throwing a rope changes the rope trajectory, climbing and slacking the rope while swinging helps build momentum, etc.  I'm not sure how to get this across to the player elegantly.  Suggestions, as usual, are welcome.

Also, how's the speed of the game;  too fast?  Too slow?

It's a decent speed, it's just a quirky method of moving around and such that makes it difficult. Also that is some EVIL momentum you've got going on, haha.

Added an update to the game with about 965 KB of changes.  This should make the game significantly easier and actually somewhat playable.  If you have friends, the 2 player mode is pretty fun.  Read more about it at the head of this thread: http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=13422.msg400256#msg400256

There's also SECRETS in this version, which I will leave as an exercise for the the player to find.

Finally, because you guys and girls are special and you deserve it, here's some box art for the game.

I have to admit I almost didn't play more than a minute because of that music loop ... it's not that it's bad per se but it is so short and repetitive that it was kind of driving me insane ....

Then I realized I can just turn the volume off, and played through a mountain.  I'm pretty terrible at it, but the grappling was fun and it was pretty much impossible not to make progress because you seem to reset me above where I fell from, half the time :)  I never used the hammer thing.

I like the lo fi look it has -- the way you do the rope as little segments is cute.

Zaph, thanks for your input!  It means a lot to me!  The hammer is really useful on harder maps, where parts of the level are covered in ice blocks.  Also, you getting bumped up a block is usually because you jumped to the same height of that rock but didn't attach to it.  This is intentional.  You have to understand the game used to be really super hard before without this feature.

Important side note!  I noticed earlier today when I was trying to play my game at a computer that isn't my development computer that the game is unplayably fast on computers that are good.  I've updated the version with a clamped time step version, and also added a video about the not-so-secret-anymore area that you may want to call all your friends and tell them about.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8e9a7RzuKEQ

Is that the blowing out the cartridge noise at the beginning?

Style = Awesome.

Haha yeah, though I think that may have been accidentally stripped from v2.1.   :shrug2:

Played it, mighty enjoyable. Takes a while to get used to the momentum, but overall it feels very nice, and looks mighty authentic. :beer: Music is a bit repetitive though.

Hey, thanks dude.  I'm glad it's so mighty.


Yeah, I'm thinking I should maybe start at least trying to make music for my future games; seems like the next logical step in the development process.

That music is sooo annoying after a while. I was rubbish at this until I figured out that I could change the length of the rope whilst swinging. That makes the game far easier, although it is still challenging. The retro aesthetic is nice. It did take me a while to realise that the noise at the beginning was supposed to be someone blowing into the cartridge, it sounded more like chalk on a chalkboard. Mouse control would have been nice, but probably wouldn't sit right with the retro/console feel. Good work.

We apologise for the fault in the music. Those responsible have been sacked.


You got it; I wanted to stick to the control limitations of the Famicom, not to mention mouse control would have made 2 player mode very uneven.


We apologise again for the fault in the music.  Those responsible for sacking the people who have just been sacked, have been sacked.

I've updated the first post with a link to my source (http://svn2.xp-dev.com/svn/climb/), for those who are into that sort of thing.

An important note about the source; due to the limited space on the XP-Dev the repository contains only the source code and other light weight data.  If you want to build this, you will need the necessary art and libraries.  The first is easy, since you get the art folder whenever you download my game (which you've played by now... RIGHT (http://dl.dropbox.com/u/428691/Climb_v2.1.zip)?); just copy the art folder and paste it into the directory the solution is in.  The libraries are a little more tedious.

For this game I used SDL (http://www.libsdl.org/), SDL_Mixer (http://www.libsdl.org/projects/SDL_mixer/), snes_ntsc (http://slack.net/~ant/libs/ntsc.html) and Box2D (http://box2d.org/).  All the links can be found in the ReadMe and you'll probably need all of them to build the game.  I'm not sure how your Visual Studio will mutilate solution files, and tweaking it to work on arbitrary computers is a black art I dare not try so I leave it as an exercise to the user... or maybe I'm just trying a last ditch attempt to keep people from looking at my code.  Either way, you're on your own!  /me runs into the sunset with arms flailing in the air.

Oh, and if anybody gets builds on other platforms working, let me know so I can give you my highest of fives and then post it on the original post.

Link is broken. A shame, I'm looking forward to trying this! PM me when fxy!'d, plz. :)

This is kind of exactly what I needed after playing with the gimped ninja rope in that new Worms game. ;D

Feels great when you're swinging and releasing, but sometimes it feels like a crapshoot whether the rope aims up or to an angle. Ditto for which hook the rope attaches to. I like the retro graphics filter, though the rope segments really get discontinuous at long lengths.

It would be a lie if I said this game wasn't directly influenced by the Worms 2 ninja rope.  I'm glad somebody picked up on this!


I'm going to interpret 'crapshoot' as 'random', in which case I agree entirely.  The up and angle up shots happen when you're holding either up or left/right respectively, which isn't really smart since throughout most of the game you're holding those buttons down all the time.  But I didn't want to take out the ability to do it, so I left in.  I'm open to suggestion on making this more elegant.

As for the hooks, this is certainly the case on easy and medium modes, which have significantly less ice blocks; these modes aren't challenging, but I thought they were a lot of fun to play around on.  Towards the hard mode though the game becomes less about flinging yourself up and more about strategic platforming, which I found sort of interesting.  If you want to see an extreme case of what I mean, go to the difficulty setting and keep pressing right, pass the Hard difficulty and then play a 1P game.


Thanks!  I have an idea for the rope to make it more fluid which I probably won't do.  This game is done as far as I'm concerned.