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TIGSource ForumsCommunityDevLogsTip Top - Roguelike Climbing Game
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tristydee
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« on: March 20, 2020, 01:39:36 PM »

Hi All!

Tip Top is a climbing game that will take you on adventures to all corners of the globe. Alone or with friends.







You climb by moving your hands from hold to hold. You'll need to find the optimal route up a cliff in order to reach the top without running out of endurance.

When you fall (by running out of endurance or jumping and missing a hold) you'll be able to survive to try again, providing you've clipped your rope into the wall recently. Otherwise you'll die and the roguelike nature of the game will come into play. I think this twist on the genre, where you're able to put a stake in your progress, works really well!

I've been working on the game part time for over a year now and am about half-way done, a huge amount of polish and content remain. As well as some missing features, like a daily run and a cooperative climbing mode.

This is what the game looks like at the moment:



It's quit a lot of fun and works well in single and split screen multiplayer. My main design worry at the moment is weather the skill ceiling is as high as it needs to be. So it's getting to the point where I need to be doing a lot of in depth testing.

I'll try and get in the habit of posting here regularly, up next should be the different types of mountains one can scale!
« Last Edit: June 01, 2021, 05:07:28 AM by tristydee » Logged

Tip Top is a roguelike climbing game that will let you explore the world alone or with friends
https://tristandahl.de/tip-top/
walaber
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« Reply #1 on: March 20, 2020, 08:10:45 PM »

A mountain climbing game, awesome!  The world is really lacking in games based on climbing I think.  Looking forward to seeing the progress, the game is already looking really nice!
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Indie developer, especially interested in physics of the human body, currently working on untitled gymnastics/acrobatics game.
AlexVsCoding
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« Reply #2 on: March 21, 2020, 12:00:03 PM »

I really love the look of this game, the colour palette is absolutely gorgeous! Very excited to see where this goes.

A good point of reference you might want to have a nosey at Climbing Flail! Both of you have made delicious climbing games: https://twitter.com/Korigame/status/1138864053701361664

Do you have a Twitter, would love to give this some attention!
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tristydee
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« Reply #3 on: March 22, 2020, 10:20:54 AM »

Thanks you two!

Alex, I've played Climbing Fail, but they're so different mechanically that I wasn't able to learn a huge amount from it. One similar game that I stumbled across recently is:
https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=68652.msg1412731#msg1412731
It has similar mechanics even though it has pretty much the opposite visual style  Smiley
I am on twitter: https://twitter.com/Tristan__Dahl
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Tip Top is a roguelike climbing game that will let you explore the world alone or with friends
https://tristandahl.de/tip-top/
tristydee
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« Reply #4 on: March 24, 2020, 12:20:00 PM »

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 Smiley ).


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!
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Tip Top is a roguelike climbing game that will let you explore the world alone or with friends
https://tristandahl.de/tip-top/
tristydee
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« Reply #5 on: November 26, 2020, 10:49:03 PM »

The game now has a Steam Page!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1458960/Tip_Top/

Along with some fantastic Steam artwork from Studio Huckepack!







And now I need to figure out how to get thousands of people to wishlist the game before it releases in April.
I've opted in to the February Steam Game Festival, which should hopefully help.
I'll also upload that demo to Itch.io come February, that way I can use itch's reach as well.

Once the Steam Screenshots are prettier (more art is on the way), I'll also pay for reddit ads, using this twitter thread by Mike Rose as a guide:
https://twitter.com/RaveofRavendale/status/1237326290543357953

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Tip Top is a roguelike climbing game that will let you explore the world alone or with friends
https://tristandahl.de/tip-top/
bbtombo
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« Reply #6 on: November 29, 2020, 10:32:57 AM »

aw man this looks awesome! love some good rock climbing. gonna follow
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tristydee
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« Reply #7 on: May 13, 2021, 10:37:50 PM »

Long time no post!

I've taken a month off of work to finish Tip Top!
The game is pretty much done, so the focus for this first of four weeks was to get a trailer made and to start using some of my marketing budget (games is 50% funded through a German government grant) on Reddit ads.

This is the image going along with the reddit ads:

I'll post again once I know how the ads are going, as I guess this is an interesting topic for most.

The game has been on Steam for about half a year now, and only has 500 wishlists! 400 of these wishlists game from the February Steam Demo festival. So it's safe to say the game isn't doing great. Hopefully the reddit ads will start fixing this.

I think a big factor as to why the game has fared so badly on Steam is that I launched the steam page too early. I wanted it to be live to gather wishlists half a year before launch. But, the game didn't have a trailer yet and the images on the store page were all of the same location in the game. So I think I ruined the game's reputation for the Steam algorithm by having a bad store page live!

It'll be interesting to see whether having the trailer up will make a big difference to wishlists.
This is what the game's trailer ended up looking like:




Here's the Steam page:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1458960/Tip_Top/

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Tip Top is a roguelike climbing game that will let you explore the world alone or with friends
https://tristandahl.de/tip-top/
tristydee
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« Reply #8 on: June 01, 2021, 05:07:09 AM »

Tip Top is out now on Steam!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1458960/Tip_Top/

I've been working on the game part time for 2.5 years now and I'm really proud with how it turned out. It's smaller than what I'd planned, but I think it really captures the feeling of climbing and is a lot of fun! Please have a look at the steam page if you're interested, I really need the support Smiley

The game is launching with 958 wishlists, so I'm not hoping for much in the way of sales. I've been running reddit ads for two weeks now, costing me about 100$ per day (with 20-30 wishlists a day on average). That would equal about 4$ dollars per wishlist and if every second wishlist ends up being a sale, then it'd come pretty close to breaking even for a 10$ game.


I think the ads were definitely worth it and would even consider having ads go live together with the Steam Page announcement in the future. That should help with teaching the Steam algorithm that a game is worth pushing.

Okay, that's it for today!
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Tip Top is a roguelike climbing game that will let you explore the world alone or with friends
https://tristandahl.de/tip-top/
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