We tried to out-climb a good player with a harder mountain. It didn't work.
Clearing the Summit used to be where a run ended. Now a player can keep going — and the thing that finally stops a strong run isn't a steeper floor. It's the camera.
A NiceBounce expedition is three legs and a Summit — about 30 seconds for a decent run. Players kept saying the same thing: the perk drafts were the best part, and the run ended just as they started to matter. A run only holds all three of its perks for about the last 12% of its length. So: what happens if the Summit isn't the end?
First attempt: just make it harder
The obvious answer was a harder mountain past the Summit — narrower floors, meaner wind, the usual knobs, capped so the generator never produced something literally impossible. It didn't work. Given three drafted perks and a bounded difficulty, a strong player simply doesn't lose. In testing, 13 of 30 strong runs hit an 8-minute hard cap built in just to stop the test itself from running forever — and with a fresh perk at every leg border, nearly all of them did.
The ceiling was the problem. A sweet spot can only shrink so far before a perfect landing becomes mathematically impossible — and a run that can't be won by skill and can't be lost by skill either just... continues. Grinding the difficulty up further doesn't end a good run. It just makes the part before the ending worse.
The fix never touches a single floor
From the fifth leg past the Summit, the camera itself starts rising — a little faster with every leg, no cap, ever. The floors stay exactly as climbable as they always were; the ball simply dies if it falls behind the rising edge of the screen, the same way it always has when it drops out of view. Nothing about the mountain's generation changes, which matters for a separate promise the game makes: a route code has to produce the same mountain for everyone, forever, whatever perks they're holding. A harder floor would have broken that. A camera doesn't.
- A decent run today: about 30 seconds, ends at the Summit.
- Beyond the Summit, a decent run: about 110 seconds, roughly 8 legs.
- Beyond the Summit, a strong run: about 190 seconds, 24 legs — and it always falls, eventually.
Every strong run now ends. Not because the mountain got harder than the player — it never does — but because the screen itself stops waiting. The open question is the one no simulation can answer: whether climbing another eight legs past the Summit, drafting a perk roughly every ten seconds while the dark rises behind you, actually feels like a reward or just a longer way to lose.