About TopStack
In TopStack you control a mining robot and destroy blocks to gain points.
There are new blocks falling from above, so you have to keep your eyes open to not get crushed by them.
You can leave the current stage at almost any point in the game, and by proceeding to the next stage the overall layout as well as the speed at which new blocks appear will change. You can also stay in any stage as long as you like to maximize the amount of points to get out of the stage.
The points you earn for destroying blocks have various roles. The
current amount directly represents your score (as in highscore), and
therefore it is in your interest to get as many as possible. You can
also use the points to buy upgrades for your robot, and you are also
charged a certain amount of points to be able to continue the game in
case your robot gets destroyed.
We will first take a look at the
available upgrades and try to categorize them. By doing so we will see
the different strategies of playing TopStack, which are subject of the game’s balancing efforts.
Shiny Upgrades
Whenever you leave a stage in TopStack, you will access the upgrade menu. The upgrade menu allows you to spend your points on upgrades. Each upgrade has set costs which increase for every time you buy it. Therefore focusing on a single kind of upgrade can become quite expensive pretty fast. Let us take a look at each type of upgrade!
TopStack features the following upgrades for your mining robot:
Jump Speed
The jump speed directly influences the inital speed of a jump, effectively increasing the overall jump height.
The robot you control can actually climb up surfaces and blocks up to a certain degree, so the necessary use of jumping gets a bit limited, but jmuping is nonetheless a great tool to climb up big stacks of blocks, and also to jump over the often present gap between you current spot and the stage’s exit.
Walk Speed
Much like the jump speed upgrade decides your vertical movement speed, the walk speed upgrade influences the speed at which your robot moves horizontally.This is naturally helpful to dodge falling blocks, but since the horizontal speed also is used to decide the max climbing height, it can be useful to upgrade the walk speed to ensure your ability to freely move around the stage.
Block Price
This is where the upgrades become interesting. Destroying a single block at the start of the game will earn you 0.1 points. By upgrading the block price, you can increase this value, and since a usual session of TopStacks sees hundreds if not thousands of blocks destroyed, upgrading the value of every single block will have a big impact on your long-term financial situation. Apart from the usual blocks, there are treasure blocks. Every treasure blocks is 100 times worth a normal block, so upgrading the block price will make the treasure blocks even more attractive.
Health
This upgrade is pretty straightforward. You spend points to get a higher cap of HP. Well, HP should be obvious, but damage might actually need clarification at this point.
There are three sources of damage in TopStack. First, big falling blocks. Whenever you get hit by one of the big blocks falling from above, your robot will lose 3 HP. Second, small falling blocks. When a big block gets destroyed, it will split into small blocks. Those are the ones you destroy for points. Getting hit by one will cost 1 HP. Third, lava! In the first version of TopStack, lava would actually destroy your robot instantly. Since the lava was placed quite deep below the stages surface, you could climb up the walls next to it in almost every case quite easily, but it still felt to be quite unforgiving. So we decided to make the lava deal damage and thrust the robot into the air in the game’s update.
Upgrading HP has the obvious merit to give you more margin for compensating failure, so you might want to upgrade it at least a few times.
Repair Cost
Even though it might seem to take away some of the player’s agency, TopStack forces you to spend your points on repairing your robot whenever you enter the upgrade menu. This might seem quite arbitrary, but there is a good reason for this rule. By forcing the player to repair their robot, they start to value actually dodging blocks and trying to stay alive a lot more. Especially at high HP, it might seem more efficient to not repair and rely on buying a new robot every time it gets destroyed. To compensate for this forced spending of points, you can buy repair cost upgrades which will reduce the cost per HP healed with each stage. “Great, so I pump some points into this, and than I can start exploiting the system” you might think. Not totally wrong, but it is still quite a commitment to spend your points on this upgrade, so you might prefer something else. Or do you?
Dig Speed
Whenever you push the dig button, the blocks directly below or in front of you will be destroyed.
Upgrading the dig speed effectively reduces the cooldown until you can destroy the next block. Therefore it helps you to keep the overall block count under control. Much like upgrading the block price, being able to destroy more blocks will result in higher profits in a set amount of time.
Different upgrade strategies
Looking at the upgrades like this, upgrading dig speed and block cost seems to be the way to go, since doing so will guarantee you the highest profits. And to a certain degree this might be true. This strategy reaches its limits when you proceed to later stages. The amount of blocks falling from above will make it hard to dodge all of them, and a high dig speed has the tendency to leave you left in a deep hole if you don’t keep moving all the time. Being stuck in a hole without a big amount of Health or great climbing capabilities can easily be the last thing you will do.
It looks like we finally start to see the intricacies of balancing your upgrades. We will now take a look at a few distinct strategies, and will discuss their specific pros and cons. By doing so, we will see the different variables which can be tweaked to change and fine tune the overall game balance.
Survival
In a hostile environment such as the pits of TopStack, focusing on survival should be a no-brainer. If you think about going full out on your survivability, there are several upgrades which can help you. The survival strategy can be roughly broken down into two distinct playstyles.
On the one hand you have the playstyle which focuses on movement. This should be quite obvious, since we saw earlier that upgrading your movement not only makes dodging blocks much easier, but it can also drastically increase your robot’s ability to jump over gaps or even climb out of deep holes in short time reliably.
On the other hand, we have the tank like style of survival. Pumping every point you have into upgrading your HP, you will naturally be more resilient. If you try to not be hit anyway, your chances of not getting destroyed might look better than with any other playstyle.
Profit
The profit focused strategy will maximize dig speed, cost per block, and as a bonus might invest some points into the repair costs to decrease involuntarily spending too much. The viability of this strategy should be quite easy to understand, since increasing earnings and being able to destroy more blocks in the same amount of time obviously results in more overall income.
We already looked at the benefits of dig speed and block price, so we can summarize the profit oriented strategy as follows: Destroying as many blocks as fast as possible for as much points as possible to overcome failure by throwing money at it. I heard people saying that throwing money at problems won’t solve them. TopStack’s profit oriented playstyle might be the exception that proofs the rule!
Balance
“So, why should I spend ever increasing amounts of points on a few upgrades if I can have them all?” You might ask. Of course, no one will force you to play TopStack one way or another, so you might try to go for a balanced kind of strategy. Spending points on every upgrade will result in an overall lower amount of money spent on upgrades in respect to the count of upgrades you bought when compared to a more focused upgrade strategy. This has the merit that you can profit from all the upgrades. The problem is that you only profit from all those upgrade only to a certain amount. Playing a balanced style, you might feel like the game just constantly gets faster, since you move faster, you dig faster, and blocks fall faster. If you change the music to something more classic, TopStack might mutate into some kind of slapstick performance. Good for you if you’re into that!
Purist
Compared to the strategies described above, the purist can be understood more as a gimmicky way of playing TopStack than an actual strategy. Playing as a purist basically means to not buy any upgrades at all. By doing so, the full force of TopStack’s difficulty curve will hit you as you move along, making the time you have to effectively dodge incoming blocks or the time you can stay before the mountain of blocks will make the stage unplayable shorter with every stage.
There are no real benefits in this kind of playing, apart from being a good way to train to become better at the game. One might think that not spending anything on upgrades would be good for reaching a better highscore, but since you can neither leverage the increased agility of the movement upgrades, nor the increasing profits of the economic upgrades, you will face destruction more often than with any other playstyle, resulting in an explosion of costs for buying new robots. Anyway, if you are searching for a challenge, try playing TopStack’s stage 10 with no upgrades at all…
Fine tuning upgrades, finding a balance
We now looked at the different kinds of upgrades, and also described some common strategies which can be used to effectively leverage them. In a game which supports a broad variety of playstyles it can be quite hard to find a good balance to make sure that every upgrade offers enough to be a good choice, and also to avoid exploits. Sadly, there is no magic bullet… there is no easy way to find the balance which fits your game, so you have to do it the usual way. Testing. Testing. Some more Testing. Testing everything, all the time. But here is one advice I can actually give you: Before you start testing like a mindless zombie, you might want to decide on what kind of feeling you want to invoke. Based on that decision, you can more easily analyze which parts of your game need to be tuned, changed etc., and you will actually get an idea HOW you might want to do so.
For TopStack we decided on a quite hard difficulty curve. To achieve a hard difficulty curve without outright murdering the player, you have to be creative. TopStack tries to offer fairness by basically allowing the player to stay in any stage as long as they like, effectively giving them access to unlimited resources. But to make sure that this won’t turn out to be exploitable, the block count will always increase faster than you can possibly destroy them. Therefore you will finally be forced to leave the stage, increasing the difficulty and making you chase after the pace of the game. And since you are forced to leave the stage, you will always feel a scarcity of resources. You will never feel like you bested the game, and you will never feel really safe.
This scarcity is crafted by the need to buy upgrades for ever increasing costs, the need to keep some spare points to be able to buy a robot in case your current one gets destroyed, and also by being forced to repair your robot whenever you leave a stage. To produce a satisfying result, it is necessary to find out by how much every upgrade should increment the related stats, and you have to take a close look at how much points you can expect the player to make in a stage, so you can decide on how much the upgrades should cost, and by how much their prices should increase with every level.
All of this takes a lot of work, but if you know what you want to achieve, and steadily work towards that goal, it is definitely possible to make the game feel like you want it to.
This post has become quite lengthy, and I am very grateful if you actually read this far. It would be great if you found something inspiring in this post to apply to your project.
What are your strategies for balancing your games? What do you want the player to feel? If you have any thoughts or comments, please tell us down below!
Thank you for reading!