Deep Climb is a game about achieving one’s goals in spite of the challenges and difficulty facing them. As a team, we have had some difficult discussions about how we can give this opportunity to players using the existing technology we have available to us while being broadly accessible. One avenue we researched was the use of micro-transactions to allow players to buy the opportunity to respawn after falling, minimise lost progress or skip sections entirely. This technique is most often seen in the mobile gaming environment where gameplay is locked behind a resource which can be earnt slowly or purchased immediately.

We decided to steer away from this game dev practice for a few reasons. Firstly, with our game being designed for PC, the audience would not be as receptive to such an uncommon approach and could cause disdain for the game. Secondly, this technique does not offer greater accessibility to the game as it limits players with minimal entertainment spending and offers affordances to those who do.

This pushed us down the path which led to the game being less restrictive than some of its predecessors as players can play with checkpoints that undo many mistakes. We believe this leaves the decision of how challenging Deep Climb is up to the player, whether they want to play with checkpoints and restarts, or if they want to speedrun the game. This means that Deep Climb can be more approachable and accessible for a wider audience of players and not just hardcore precision platform gamers.