Tower Toppler

In this game you have to help a cute little green animal 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 arond 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. It was available for PC, Atari, C64. The author was J.M.Phillips and was published by Hewson software. I have seen the PC version on quite a few abandonware sites. But it is only a DOS version and uses ugly graphics.

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.

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State of the Work

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 leveleditor that allows everyone to create new towers and missionfiles. So I am awaiting all your selfmade missions.

My rating on happypenguin (please rate me there, excpecially, if you like the game):

Downloads Screenshots Contact Documentation

News
22.12.2012

Version 1.1.6 of toppler released.

A lot of things happened since my last release in 2007. I had handed the project over to another developer. But he neither found enough time to do proper development. He did 2 releases which introduced some bugs that he was unable to fix.

So I've taken over the project again. Went beck to 1.1.3, fixed all the problems that were found and this is this release. The following things have been changed in relation fo release 1.1.3

  • fix memory leaks
  • proper program ending instead of an uncaught exception
  • fix all warnings when compiling
  • make compilable on modern systems
  • included missions are now in the datafile insted of separate files
  • fix joystick support

Thanks to Bill Allombert, who had been a driving force within the last years making me finally take over again. He also helped with the production of this release.

We also deprecated the olc CVS repository and switched to darcs. See below at the download links for how to access it.

19.07.2007

Version 1.1.3 of toppler is now available. The changes include

  • A new mission David1
  • New translations: Czech, Rumanian, Basque
  • Include the background music within the distribution
Thanks to the translators and Davd for his mission. Also thanks to Volker for making crosscompilation possible by providing a simple environment (http://www.profv.de/mingw_cross_env) and by fixing all kinds of things in my build environment that were missing for crosscompilation. I can now generate the Windows binaries and installer completely on Linux without any hassle.
15.2.2006

Oops, the last release has 2 problems:

The program was not compilable without SDL-Mixer installed

There was a problem in the makefiles that made it stop with an error when trying to install

Both problems are hotfixed in a file called toppler-1.1.2a. This is still the same release it just fixes the 2 problems. Only people downloading the source are affected.

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Downloads

Latest versions
Source

1.1.6

Windows Binary

1.1.6

BeOS Binary

1.0.2

OS X Binary

1.1.1

Background music (only for releases before 1.1.3)

Music

Development does on inside a Darcs repository. Use the following 3 commands to gain read access. If you want to apply a patch mail it to me.

darcs get http://toppler.sourceforge.net/repos/levels/
darcs get http://toppler.sourceforge.net/repos/datafile/
darcs get http://toppler.sourceforge.net/repos/toppler/

Other version of the software can be found on the Sourceforge project page.

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Screenshots

Here are some screenshots. The first three are taken from the 1st, 2nd and 4th level. The fourth screenshot shows the bonuslevel.

Level 1 Level 2
Level 4 Bonuslevel
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Contact

If you find bugs, if you have more levels, suggestions for improvements or if you want to help improve this game don't hesitate to use our mailing list
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Thank yous

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.

Credits

Blender The Bonus level graphics and the submarine are modelled and rendered using blender
POV-Ray Most of the robots and thingies on the tower were rendered using POV-Ray
SDL now! The game itself uses the SDL Library to display the graphics and play sounds. (You also need the SDL_Mixer library for the sound output)
SourceForge Sourceforge provides the discspace for this webpage.