The climbing was boring, so I changed it

Climbing in TITANCLIMB used to let you scale basically any wall. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that it had become a chore, so I went back and reworked how climbing itself works.

Change 1: You can only climb walls that have holds

I was taken with the way Breath of the Wild lets you go anywhere in the field, and I’d kept that approach. But no matter how much I playtested — or rather, the more I playtested — I kept finding the act of climbing boring. (In a game whose whole theme is climbing a titan!)

So I took the plunge and changed it: you can only climb where it looks like you could actually get a grip.

This game cares a lot about the realism of mountain climbing. Link can climb anything, but when you think about it, the walls a real human being can climb are pretty limited. And it took me until now to remember that in hiking and rock climbing, the first interesting thing you do is look for where you might be able to climb at all.

Which way you go here depends on what kind of game you’re making. Cairn is close to this approach, I think, while PEAK goes the other way and lets you climb almost anywhere.

On top of that, like Cairn, the character now plants hands and feet properly on the holds as they climb. It isn’t as strict as Cairn, where you’re managing stamina hold by hold — for me it’s more about presentation — but it makes the act of climbing feel much more real while you’re doing it.

Change 2: You can pick a target and jump to it

You could already jump from one surface to another while climbing, but it only ever meant “cover a lot of ground at once,” with no real upside to it. I think that was feeding the boredom too.

So I changed the controls a little: you now select a target to jump to, confirm it, and the character jumps there.

That opens up decisions in how you climb. The video shows one — no hold within reach, but a jump will get you to one — and there’s also the trade-off between working your way across patiently and taking a shortcut by jumping.

How much of that pays off depends on the level design from here, but at the very least, jumping is a lot more fun to do than it was before.