About
Nebulus is a late-1980s vertically scrolling platform game created by John M. Phillips and published by Hewson Consultants, released internationally under names including Castelian, Kyorochan Land, Subline, and Tower Toppler; the player climbs a rotating cylindrical tower, seeing only the 180 degrees currently facing the screen. Tower Toppler is a from-scratch reimplementation of Nebulus/Tower Toppler, first written in Pascal with the author's own hand-painted (and POV-Ray-rendered) graphics, then ported to Linux/C using SDL2 for graphics and sound. It's fully playable and includes a level and mission editor; its SDL2-based v1.2+ release added proper fullscreen support, a resizable window, improved lighting and shadow effects, and smoother robot animation.
How it differs from the original
Unlike the original, none of the game's graphics are taken from the commercial release — the author repainted them from scratch, with help from POV-Ray — so the game needs no original assets to run.
Getting started
Build from source with make (needs SDL2_mixer, SDL2, and zlib), then either install it or run the resulting game directly from the build directory; steer the character around the rotating tower with the cursor keys, press up to enter doors, and press space to throw a snowball or jump.
History
The author reprogrammed the original game in Pascal some years after first enjoying it, later porting that version to Linux/C with SDL for this release; a full version-by-version changelog is included in the repository.