The Night the Tower Game Nearly Broke Me

Every game on this site went through at least one rewrite, but the climbing tower gave me more trouble than the other twenty-six combined. The idea is simple enough on paper: pick a tile, climb a floor, decide whether to keep going or bank the points. Getting the odds to feel right at every floor took considerably longer than writing the actual interface.

The first version was too generous near the top, which meant every round felt like it was building toward a guaranteed climb rather than a genuine decision. The second version overcorrected so hard that nobody ever made it past floor four, and testers started assuming the game was broken rather than just difficult. Neither version got anywhere near a public build.

What finally worked was slowing down how quickly the risk increases per floor, rather than trying to fix it with a single flat number. It sounds like an obvious answer written down like this, but it took a late night, a lot of scrap paper, and one very patient friend clicking through test rounds to actually land on it.

There's a small irony in a game about climbing floor by floor being the one that kept sending the whole project back down to the ground floor of the to-do list. I'm fairly happy with where it landed now, though I reserve the right to tweak it again if enough people tell me floor seven feels off.

If you play it and get an odd sense that a particular floor feels harder than the ones either side of it, you're probably right, and I'd genuinely like to hear about it.