I apologize if you use the game in HTML5 as the room creation speed will be a tad slow.

'A' to move left

'D' to move right

'Space' to jump

'Left-Click' to shoot your grappling hook

You have to be clicking on a wall tile to shoot your grappling hook. You can not shoot through walls, so click on tiles near you.

The spinning diamond objects are coins, so collect them.

The turtle things are enemies, don't get hit by them or you will die.

Get the the Portal to move to the next level.

How high can you get your score?

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  • Jupiter Hadley
    Lv. 13

    Very interesting game! I included it in my GM48: One Tool, Many Uses compilation video series, if you’d like to take a look. :) https://youtu.be/VY1l7qmII10

  • Fachewachewa
    Patron

    As other have said, the spawning code needs a lot more work. Out of a dozen tries I got :

    • instantly killed 3 times
    • spawned in a wall once (I guess it's because the player object has its origin in the center unlike the walls)
    • spawned... nowhere 3 times (which threw the game in an infinite loop and I had to kill it in the manager)

    Also, like Kwis said, it's kinda infuriating to make us lose time to restart by pressing enter. You want to let the player go back almost instantly, especially in a game when you can die so fast. There are other way to prevent an accidental skip besides having the player use a key that's never used elsewhere in the game.
    Oh and if you let the player use the arrow keys, make sure you can jump with up instead of space, because people don't have 3 hands and that's something I've seen way too much in this jam.

    On the gameplay side, I'd say the game is too fast. You either get in a safe space and collect things from there or get killed almost instantly by turtles.

    • Zurui
      Lv. 6
      Zurui Developer of Hook Line

      6yrs ago

      I agree. I've been reworking the spawn code a lot and if you want to give the updated version a go, https://zurui.itch.io/hook-line. Feel free to leave feedback there as well if you want. As for the infinite loop issue, I have yet to find where it is happening. I thought it was in the player code but when I added a check, it still happened.

      As for the restarting, I added shift as a way to restart to make it easier. As for arrow key use, I changed the way the hook behaves so up won't work but I will figure something out.

      Thanks for the feedback!

  • SirTotallyAverage
    Lv. 15

    Love that you did procedural generation. There were a few things that broke it for me though:

    The first time I spawned I had no clue where I was (the arrow pointing could have been much bigger). The second time a bug spawned right above my head and fell on me and I died right away. The third time, the portal spawned one block to my right.

    A few more checks / parameters to keep the player from spawning near a portal / bug and it would have been much better.

    Good job with the loading screen, but just one design note, I had a hard time keeping track of the player character during game-play because he was so small. If he had been the same size as the blocks (err... volumetrically) it would have been better. The same goes for the bugs. Felt like they should be the same size as the coins. Or you could have just zoomed in the view a bit and had it follow the player, because I did like the larger room design.

    Also, the tool didn't seem to have more than one use :)

    • Zurui
      Lv. 6
      Zurui Developer of Hook Line

      6yrs ago

      Sorry about the bad luck with your spawns. I have been re-working the code and spawning quite a lot. I will be keeping an up to date version https://zurui.itch.io/hook-line so feel free to give the updated version a try. The current version has a much better spawn system.

      I am still trying to figure out a better way of showing where the player spawns at but haven't managed to come up with any solid ideas, if you have any, drop me a comment over on itch.io please lol. I will look into making the player bigger and maybe make the coins smaller so everything is proportional. The view isn't zoomed because I wanted to be able to click shoot from side to side of the room for some quick and fun maneuvers.

      As for the grappling hook, you could use it to get around, grab coins, and kill enemies. That is 3 uses right there.

      Other then that, thanks for the feedback!

  • Kwis
    Lv. 67

    Wow hem... okay.

    First of all, the game is at first VERY confusing. It took me to come back into the page description to check if I forgot a very important information. Turns out the player may start aside an enemy and it happened often. But I guess previous feedback would have already told that.

    You need to have something more than a black arrow to make the player notice the player cause i had to restart a bunch of times before getting where you were supposed to spot the player. That's already a bad sign if you have to get where you are.

    The fact that the level is auto generated is nice but sitting through it is a bit annoying to me, you're just left waiting. It shouldn't take more than a second in my opinion.

    Also, avoid using "enter" to restart; it's not convenient when the keys are A, D, space and mouse (cause your hands are on the left and right while the enter key is between those, forcing you to move change hand position; it might seem like a small thing but it still feels tedious)

    • Zurui
      Lv. 6
      Zurui Developer of Hook Line

      6yrs ago

      Thanks for the feedback. I am working on fixing issues such as spawning near enemies and the like. I have fixed the spawning near enemies issue already. I will be adding a better way to find the player, maybe start the sprite off large and shrink it to reg size in position or something.

      The generation doesn't take too long if you downloaded the game. the HTML5 version takes a long time I agree. I will look into making the generation faster.

      Finally the reason i chose enter over like space , which I did have it at, was because if, when it was space, you might be pressing space right as you die and thus go to the menu without being able to see the final score and the like. Also, I added the ability to play with the arrow keys as well. Ill add a more convenient for AD players, but keep space for arrow key players.

  • Charlotte Woolley
    Lv. 2

    Really loved the room generation, though unfortunately I did die on two occasions after it had finished and I pressed space to start like Joseph mentioned.

    I played on HTML5 and the room speed felt great not too slow at all :)

    The control on the grappling hook was at times difficult, but otherwise I really enjoyed playing the game, with a bit of smoothing out I could see myself getting hook!

    • Zurui
      Lv. 6
      Zurui Developer of Hook Line

      6yrs ago

      Yea, I need to work on the player spawn and fix that little issue out. probably just a matter of changing from place_meeting to distance_to_object.

      And the room speed on html is fine, its the generation speed that is a lot slower on html than if you downloaded it.

      Also great pun at the end there! I always appreciate well placed puns.

  • Joseph
    Lv. 4

    Presentation is pretty good and the gif icon made me want to try it. I like the idea and the randomly generated algorithm is pretty cool. I really like that I can watch the level as it builds, that's always been something interesting to me in games. The music is kinda catchy too.

    At first I didn't realize that I could just click the diamonds and the turtles to collect / kill them, you could add that to the controls description. It's also hard to control your momentum while you are grappled (I wanted to press up to go up but I just kept going down for example), and I often got stuck in the walls while trying to jump away from enemies. Also, it's hard to track where your character is at the start of a level.

    I managed to get 340 points but after I beat the first level I died while the second level was generating (I'm guessing that a turtle spawned on me).

    If movement with the hook was smoother and the bugs were ironed out, it could be a lot of fun. Good job. =)

    Parum
    Submitted

    Parum

    • Zurui
      Lv. 6
      Zurui Developer of Hook Line

      6yrs ago

      Yea, I need to look into the player spawning code and see if I can figure out a better way to check if you spawned x pixels from an enemy.

      I also want to change the hook to actually just move in the direction of where you click and if you hit something then it will grapple you, or you right click to draw the grapple in or something.

      I am also thinking about making it so you can't just click the coins to get them to make things a bit more challenging.

      Thanks for your feedback though!