In this puzzle platformer where you have to help a cute little green dude switch off some kind of "evil" mechanism. The "power off switch" is hidden somewhere in high towers. On your way to the target you need to avoid a lot of strange robots that guard the tower.
That sounds all like a normal jump and run game. What makes this game different is that you walk around the tower which is revolving on the screen, so that you only see the 180° that are currently visible.
The game is a reimplementation of the old game known as Tower Toppler or Nebulus. At its time it was ported available for a lot of different platforms like PC, Atari, C64. The author was J.M.Phillips and was published by Hewson software.
Here are a few shots of some of the available original versions
Because I really enjoyed this game when it was published I reprogrammed it some years ago using PASCAL. I painted all the necessary graphics on my own (or used POVRAY) and finally got a program that behaves nearly identical if compared with the original.
Some time ago I decided to port this version to LINUX and C using SDL for the graphic and sound output. And here is the result.
The game fully playable. Everything is in place. Some more sounds could be added, surely some bugs are left but there should be nothing too serious.
There is a level editor that allows everyone to create new towers and mission files. So I am awaiting all your self-made missions.
Version 1.3 6.Feb.2022 maintenance release
- fix centering of background image in highscore menus
- add a bigger icon
- fix global highscore folder
- data file is no longer re-created unnecessarily
- install man-page
- updated translation for Czech and Finnish language
Version 1.2
User visible changes:
- port to SDL2 with the accompanying benefits:
- proper fullscreen support
- resizeable window
- variable aspect ratio properly used (instead of letterboxing) so you can finally enjoy Toppler on a widescreen
- improved visuals:
- new brick textures that look quite a bit more 3d
- shadows behind objects (robots, tower elements)
- objects get darker as they recede behind the tower
- better quality for the colour reduced data resulting in all around better looking graphics (only slightly though)
- improved bonus level graphics (better horizontal match, better antialiasing)
- fix a bug in sprite rendering that resulted in an strange looking edge for objects
- smoother animation for the robots with twice the framerate and also slightly improved animations
Under the hood
- Drop autoconf stuff and use a makefile instead
- fix all warnings
- cleanups inside the datafile creation tools
- remove the worst non-c++ stuff and replace by c++ nicer constructs I think the code looks much better now
- datafile optimisations (a slight bit smaller though that got eaten up by the graphics improvements from above)
For a complete release history look into doc/Changelog.md
Dependencies for building the game only are
- SDL2_mixer (with ogg support if you want music)
- sdl2
- zlib
if you want to rebuild the datafile you also need
- libpng
- povray
- gimp
- blender
- imagemagick
If you got all these dependencies just type
make
and if your want to install
make install
but you an also directly start the game from the source directory using
./toppler
The goal of the game is to reach the target door of each of the towers in the packages mission. This door is usually at the very top of the tower.
But finding the way by using elevators and walking trough a maze of doors and platforms is not the only problem you have to solve. There are a bunch of other creatures living on the tower that will hinder you to reach your target by pushing you over the edge of the platforms.
The only weapon of defence you have is to throw a little snowball. But most of the other creatures just don't care about this. So you must avoid them.
A little submarine brings you from one tower to the next. On this way you have the chance to get some bonus points by catching fish. All you have to do is to catch a fish in a bubble with your torpedo and then collect the fish.
-f starts the game in fullscreen mode. But be careful! If the game crashes it doesn't restore the original resolution, it stays in 640x480 pixel mode.
-s makes the game silent. If you don't have a soundcard or for another reason get an "can't open audio" error try this option.
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Password: this menu entry allows you to define a password. The password us used to restart a mission from a tower that is not the first. You get a password for every third tower while you are playing
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Lives: for the tough guys you can decrease the number of lives you start the game
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Status on top: if you prefer the game status at the bottom of the screen. Here is the place to switch
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Game speed: if you want faster gameplay, then this is the option for you. This option doesn't influence the behaviour. Only the delays between the frames is decreased.
The options here allow you to redefine the keys that are important for playing. Select the key you want to redefine. Press Enter and then the new key you want to use. Bare in mind, that you are not overwriting the old keys but just define an alternative that has a lower priority than the original keys. So you can not use "p", because this is already used for pause.
The submenus here allow you to finely tune the looks of tower toppler. Depending on your computers capabilities and you graphic card you can change here between very low requirements and modest ones. I have an Intel Celeron 366 and can play Tower Toppler with everything switched on except for the expensive waves.
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Fullscreen: Toggle between windowed and fullscreen display.
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Alpha options toggle the usage of alpha for the different objects that are drawn on screen. Alpha blitting requires a bit more time, so if the game runs too slow, switch some of them off.
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Fonts: for all the text displayed
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Sprites: for all robots and the toppler
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Scroller: for the underwater scroller in the bonus level
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Shadowing: toggles if the menu uses a translucent bar and the screen gets darker if you start the menu in the game and on some other occasions. Shadowing takes up quite a lot of time.
-
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waves: here you can toggle between nonreflecting, simple and expensive waves. Nonreflecting waves take up the lest amount of CPU time but don't look very good. Expensive waves look quite good but require quite a bit of CPU time.
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scroller: here you can toggle between a 2 layer scroller and the complete (currently 3 layer) scroller. The 2 layer scroller only draws the front and the backround layer of the underwater scroller in the bonus level.
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shadows: toggles drawing of shadows behind objects and fading objects to black as they recede behind the tower. Enable this to get a much more 3d-looking level display at the cost of a bit of performance.
Bonuses:
This toggle allows you to suppress bonus levels. Some people don't enjoy hunting fish as much as climbing towers, this allows them to only play the fun part ;-).
In the normal tower climbing game there is an indicator displaying if your computer is fast enough for the current playing mode. If you can see a small red square in the top left corner of the game then the game can not run as fast as it needs to. Consider the following options:
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drop game speed in the game options menu
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don't use the expensive waves, they ARE expensive in CPU time
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switch off some of the alpha options
In the menu you can select the mission you want to play next with the left and right cursor keys. Press space or return on the start menu item to start the game.
The animal is controlled by the cursor keys and space (or return). Left and Right make the animal walk. Up and down make the elevators move if you are on one. (The elevator platforms are a little bit smaller than the normal platforms.) If you are in front of a door press up to enter it. Pressing the space key will either throw a snowball if you are standing still or make the animal jump if you are walking.
The game finally has a leveleditor. Because I've been too lazy to make new graphics for special objects all tower objects are drawn using the existing graphics.
Because the only thing you can rely on on a keyboard are the numbers and the letter keys I have used only these. The layout is chosen so that keys with a similar task are next to each other and not that the letters mean something.
Otherwise the editor is relatively simple:
| key | description |
|---|---|
| h | shows a list of all keys with explanations |
You can move in the list with up, down and pgup, pgdown
cursor keys
| key | description |
|---|---|
| page up and down | 5 rows up and down |
| y | half turn of the tower (for doors) |
| HOME | go to starting position |
| key | description |
|---|---|
| p | play, to test the level you are just editing |
| ESC | leave the editor |
| l | load tower |
| o | save tower |
| z | check consistency of tower |
The consistency check checks if all doors are exactly 3 layers high, if there isn't a undefined symbol in there and if there is always the opposite platform for the elevators (without unremovable obstacles in between). If there is something wrong with the tower, the cursor moves to the position of the problem.
| key | description |
|---|---|
| ins and f | inserts a row below the current position |
| del and g | deletes the current row |
with these actions you must be careful because they can destroy doors.
| key | description |
|---|---|
| space | clear field |
| q | normal pillar |
| a | flashing box |
| w | normal step |
| s | vanishing step displayed as flashing step |
| x | sliding step displayed as sideways moving step |
| e | elevator top station |
| d | elevator middle station |
| c | elevator top station |
the elevator stations are shown by a moving platform. The platform is moving into the direction the elevator can move. So for the bottom stations the platform is repeatingly moving up and jumping down.
| key | description |
|---|---|
| 1-7 | the different kinds of robots |
for the eye robot the movement is shown by the movement of the robot in the editor. The slow moving version moves half as far as the fast moving one.
The two jumping balls can be identified by ball movement: one is standing still. This is the one that jumps on its place until the toppler gets near. The ball that has a sideway movement from it's beginning on is moving in the editor too.
| key | description |
|---|---|
| i | normal door |
| k | target door displayed as flashing door |
This action always places a whole door (in 3 layers) and tries to place a door on the opposite side, if it's empty. Doors should never be higher then 3 layers. The clear command (' ') will always remove the whole door but not the one on the opposite side of the tower.
The target door command doesn't place a door on the opposite side
the parameter are always in a range of values. To allow fast alterations of the values the difference between the old and the changed value increases every time you go into the same direction. So if you increase the time for the tower by pressing 'b' the first time the value increases by one the second time by two the third time by three and so on. This size is reset to one as soon as you change the direction of your changes. This sounds complicated but the best thing is to try it
| key | description |
|---|---|
| b | increase time |
| n | decrease time |
| v | open palette dialog |
In the palette dialog up and down change the color you want to change. Left and Right change the value by one, PgUp and PgDown change by 10 and the numbers make the value jump to 10 equally distributed positions on the scale
Just in case you are interested in the format of the tower file:
The format is similar to the windows configuration format. Each section starts with its name in square brackets "[]". Unknown sections are ignored. Most sections are self-explanatory, except for the data section.
This section has the tower height in its first line followed by a table where each character represents one position on the tower. The following table explains the characters used for the tower bitmap and their meaning.
| character | description |
|---|---|
| space | empty |
| v | top elevator station |
| + | middle elevator station |
| ^ | bottom elevator station |
| 1 | freeze ball |
| 2 | jumping ball moving from the start |
| 3 | jumping ball standing and then moving to you |
| 4 | robot, up down |
| 5 | robot, up down fast |
| 6 | robot left right |
| 7 | robot left right fast |
| ! | pillar |
| - | platform |
| b | flashing box |
| . | vanishing platform |
| > | slippery platform |
| < | slippery platform |
| # | normal door |
| T | target door |
The demo section is also not really obvious. The numbers represent states of the important keys. Each bit in the number corresponds to one key. If it is set the key is pressed, otherwise not. Because Tower Toppler is strictly deterministic and uses fixed intervals for display and update each line corresponds to one cycle of update and display.
I can not promise that the program will be able to load the files if you are changing them manually, so better leave your fingers away from these.
Because of the ongoing development of Tower Toppler this format is likely to change. New sections may be added, other ones deprecated. I hope that the section format will help to achieve backwards compatibility but I promise, of course, nothing. If you have problems loading your old tower files, send them to me and I'll do my best to convert them.
Also, if you want to send me your missions, please do not send the mission files, but the towers. Because the mission files are binary and are changing as well it may be quite complicated to convert a mission file generated with an old version of Tower Toppler to a new version. But it will nearly always be possible to edit the tower files.
And another paragraph for the interested ones. Here the format of the mission files is explained.
First in the mission files is the mission name. The first byte is the length of the string followed by the text itself. Then comes a priority. This value is used to sort the missions in the game menu. Then comes the number of towers in the mission followed by the offset of the tower offset table (b bytes). This table contains 4 bytes for every tower showing the starting position of the tower inside the file. The offset table is normally at the end of the file.
Now to the towers. They are structured into sections just as the tower file is. The section header contains 5 bytes. One shows the section type. The other 4 the length in bytes of the section data. Then the data follows. This allows the program to skip unknown sections.
The section numbers can be found in level.cc.
Most of the sections are fairly simple. Except for the tower and demo.
The tower data is split into 2 parts. First a bitmap detailing which places do contain something. For each occupied place there is a byte in the following data. The byte details what occupies the field. Details in the source.
The demo uses a run length encoding. One byte for the run length and one word for the key state.
So this should help to find your way into the code, if it's necessary.
With the key m in the level editor you start creating a new mission. Be aware that mission contain your towers in a compressed format and I will not provide a method to extract the original tower from this to prevent player from cheating. So keep your original tower files in case there are bugs in your towers and you need to change things.
What follows now are a pile of questions you have to answer by keyboard input.
First the name of the mission. The mission creator will write a file to your disk with the same name as the name of the mission, but you are welcome to rename the file because the mission name is saved inside the file too. The only thing you have to take care of is that the file has ".ttm" (tower toppler mission) as extension.
Now input all the filenames of the towers you want to add to this mission. The limit to the number of towers is 255 but I'd suggest to not use this many because it would take a lot of time to play through the complete mission.
If all towers have been input enter an empty name to finish this list. Now the file will be written and you should be able to select your new mission in the main menu.
IMPORTANT: please check your towers, before you create a mission, for inconsistencies, because this is not done in the created mission file.
Finally some details about the inner workings of the game that might help design levels.
- There are never more than 4 robots on screen (including the horizontal spinning object)
- robots that go below the screen vanish
- robots that fall into water vanish
- the spinning object has a timeout, if this time passed it will come as soon as there are less then 4 robots on screen
- other the robots appear as soon as they are inside the screen and there are less then 4 robots on screen
- the behaviour of the robots is completely deterministic
- the cross throws you 4 layers down, the other robots much more
- the starting place on the base is always the same, it's on top of the 2nd row on angle 0 (where the cursor is at the start HOME moves the cursor to this position)
Where does the program look for the different files?
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datafiles (graphics, sounds), readonly
- first in local directory,
- then global (per compiler switch /usr/local/share/toppler)
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local configuration file, read/write/create
- in home directory
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level editor, new missions, towers read/write/create
- in home dir (/home/user/.toppler/...)
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highscore file, read/write/create
- in global dir, home,
Webpage: toppler.sf.net Email : roever@users.sf.net
Thank you goes to all the people out there who sent me bug reports and praise. But ecspecially to
- Pasi Kallinen for tons of improvements. He coded the menu system, the demos and provided many other features for the game,
- Bastian Salmela for his very nice graphics,
- Clarence Ball for his missions,
- Andreas Wagner for the web page design.