Time's first Flash game (ever) has challenged and frustrated almost every gamer who has had the chance to play it. With challenging elements such as bombs, spikes, flying baddies, and "wompers" (my name for them), this game has an interesting twist to it -- none of the baddies can kill you. Instead, they push you around and try to make you fall.
The entire game is based on the idea of scaling a tower to the maximum heights (I've heard of some mythical place high up called "space," but never made it there yet myself). While games have done this before, none have ever (in my opinion) done it so smoothly. The game is completely randomly generated, an amazing feat in of itself with this being Time's first ever game created with FlashPunk. The game is procedurally generated very smoothly (meaning it's created as the game goes by, since technically it goes on forever); and the tileset is nice and clean.
The robot in the game (that you control) has a variety of special abilities. The first, and probably the most used, is the wall jump. Wall jump allows you to slide and launch over and up (and away) using the wall. Thus, as you can imagine, wall jump is very useful for getting past difficult areas. Still, wall jump is pretty common in platform games. That's where 'crawl-hanging' (my official title for it) comes in handy. If you jump up into a block and hold the up arrow key, you will be able to hang onto the block(s) and move left and right to get to the desired area. That, in combination with wall jumping, would seem to be enough. But that's not it. Your little robot also can create an explosion around himself, in order to either kill baddies in the area or clear away some blocks. But be warned, sometimes you can blow up all the blocks underneath you as well, and plummet to your death.
On top of all this, there's the fact he didn't just use room wrapping (walking off the left side of the screen to pop out on the right); instead he used "parallax" scrolling, which, put simply, makes the game wrap without stopping the camera when it hits the border. It may seem like a small thing, but because of it you get the illusion that the tower truly never ends. Indeed, though -- it doesn't.
The effects, although simple, are well done and make the game just that much more interesting (effects being the falling leaves, the storm blowing baddies around, etc). However, there are a few things I think could still be changed / added. The first one is the storm. It pushes the baddies and leaves around, but the main purpose should have been to increase the difficulty by pushing the robot (player) around. Also, I think that the game could look much better if some of the corner tiles had a smooth edge in order to look a bit more realistic and less boxy (and not as aligned to a grid).
A couple more things I think should be changed: the black outline around the tiles also makes them look too blocky, and the background tiles for when blocks have been blown up is too light colored and doesn't have enough variety. If they were darkened a bit and maybe some texture was added (cracks, rust, etc) the visual would be much better. Also, another minor thing that could be added would be everything (blocks, background, the robot, baddies; everything) could darken during a storm, adding another small but nice visual to the game.
I enjoyed playing Robot Climb to the max, despite being pretty horrible at it (you can see my low scores in all the screenshots). The unique elements, and even the not so unique ones, make for a fun little game to pass time. The only real complaint I have, besides some graphics which I mentioned earlier, would be that the hanging grass tile loads late at times, jumping onto the screen awkwardly. I highly recommend that you play this game for yourself, as I doubt you will be able to put it down for a long time to come.
-turboRamble
Thanks turboRamble! I'm going to be adding one more version to completely finish off the game once I get my hands on some music, and I planned on doing a little tweaking which this will definitely help with.
Read more from turboRamble on his blog or Twitter account.
