Mountain types!When I started prototyping the game, one of the first things I implemented was a few different types of mountain for the player to climb on. Each with their own hazards. I'll go into detail on the mountain types I have in the game at the moment in this post. Further suggestions are very welcome!
Birds!Birds fly in from one side of the screen and out on the other. If they collide with the player then some of your stamina is deducted. This is a mechanic that might work well in a side scrolling platformer, but feels horrible in Tip Top. One is simply not able to move quickly enough to avoid a collision. Restricting the hitbox to a certain part of the player's body helps with this, but that then becomes a UX problem that needs to be solved.
So, the current implementation does not work, one idea I am toying with is having the player be able to knock birds away with their hands, this would compensate for the slower movement speed in the game.
Sand clouds!Clouds move in front of the camera and partially obscure your field of vision. This was trivial to implement and is really quite cool! I enjoy having to remember where holds should be and occasionally will even risk jumps to land on holds that are behind a cloud. It also adds an extra layer of tactics to the game, as you might want to use the time where a cloud is in the way to recover some endurance or clip your rope into the wall.
Slippery holds!Your hands will slowly slide downwards after grabbing on to a hold. This doesn't work well as it's more annoying than exciting. It's also difficult to communicate when your hand reaches the point where its no longer over a hold and you'd fall.
Ice holds!A few seconds after first touching a hold they'll fall off. This works well as it can be communicated well to the player and lends itself to some interesting levels, where one can either take the easy route (which will cost more endurance) or risk it and go with the icy holds. The way it's implemented at the moment ice holds will magically reappear whenever you fall and try again. But I'd like to persist their state, this would make the level get harder each attempt and is a nice way of increasing the stakes for the final levels in the game (which has permadeath if you fall without having clipped your rope in to the wall nearby
).
That's it for now!
One other idea I have is something like the opposite of the ice holds. Routes that get easier over time as you can "clean" holds to get access to them for future attempts.
I'm very keen to hear your ideas!