Gravity Hook!

[Xion]

As Adam said, you speed up as you get closer to the node, so by releasing when closest, you subsequently release when fastest.

My high score is around 1300, I think...yeah, I think it was 1396.

[Rosse]

Aww, that's not fair. I said to myself, I'm going to post here when I get at least 1000m and now, bOOm, exactly 1000m... now I want more.

I think you definitely achieved some oldskool feel in me. The last game I bought was Zelda Twilight Princess for Wii and the only good thing about it was, that I bought the NES Zelda for Virtual Console which I played more often than the new-gen crap. So I virtually played no games since 1 year or so for more than a few minutes. And your small game made me play it for 1 or more hour now and I'm going to continue playing it when I wrote that post Apart from the indie-scenes I'm not very interested in games and even in the scene itself I don't play many because of my mac. This online-game really makes my heart jump!
Additionally that game is the first which makes me to want to break the highscore. Normaly I played game just for the sake of it. But now I want into the highscore... damn you ptoing!

The game mechanics are very interesting. This simple game allows a bunch of different ways of playing with nothing more than a robot, grapplinghook and some nodes... awesome! You could play the fast and dangerous way (small or big distances with high risk of collision) or slow (small distances with small risk or collision) or maximised swinging and so on. It's totally up to the the player and the game doesn't force you to something.

[edit] I wonder how your node-algorithm works. Is it completely random, just lesser nodes the higher you are or something more complex (like keeping an overall distance between nodes)?


What's that framework you talked about? This pixelperfect (flashgame?) makes my coderfinges itch. I coded two small games (with Blitzbasic 1,2) and now seeing this want me to make one again. Do you have some information somewhere on the net or would you like to talk about it here?

[tocky]

This is an excellent spiderman game.

Sometimes the node selection seems wrong, I feel like maybe it ought to choose the nearest node I'm lined up with vertically, and maybe horizontally, if there is one.

It gets hard to keep track of how high you are with glancing about, and there's this sense that it doen't matter how high you get because it's all the same. So I feel like there needs to be more progress markers, even simple ones like shifts in the colours or music every x00 meters, where x is something like 3-6.

There's a pretty complex skill progression to it, which is commendable. I felt like I was constantly discovering different ways to move about, and that's really cool.

[AdamAtomic]

Thanks guys I'm glad you like it!

tocky: Yeah I wanted to have the background change to something unique every 100m or so but I just got straightup lazy   it was going to be a lot of work, so I opted for something simpler, and frankly less good.

rosse: I've been developing a pixel framework for Flash for doing these game sketches.  It has online high score support, state manager, sprites, arrays, buttons, scrolling, a few other thingies.  It uses primarily bitmapdata objects and bypasses the whole normal flash displaylist and memory mgmt stuff to get decent running speeds and support per-pixel zoom effect.  I am hoping to put out an at least mediocre-ly documented version maybe at the end of the month?  It's a nice setup, I was able to do the first prototype of this game in maybe 3 or 4 hours I think, with support for online scores, main menu, and all basic gameplay.

[PypeBros]

nicely put. It would have cost me all my coins if it was an arcade game ! ...
Would you mind if i use those pictures to blog this ?

*edit* : blogged ^_^

[AdamAtomic]

nope knock yourself out man   thanks!

[Sherman Gill]

1600 first try .

Anyway, awesome, Adam, it's quite fun now that it's shiny and makes noise .

[Conzeit]

Damn o_o. Eh...I mean AWESOME! XD

I have that gravity game idea lurking in the back of my head like anyone else....and this works better than I could imagine mine to  I'm afraid I've become a bit too spoiled to play it...I want like upgrades and stuff once I'm high enough so that my hook has more reach and such....c.c but I know this is solid gameplay.

What I REALLY dont like is the fact that everything is so impersonal. Why are you simply a BALL? make it a spider that freaks out when you're too close to the mines....and the mines...the idea of them expanding when you latch on to them is nice...I would make it more extreme with spikes coming out and such....maybe give them character as well...but that's really your choice...

[Rosse]

I don't agree with the idea of more features. This game is like tetris. You have a startpoint and some boundaries (rules). That's everything and nothing changes while you play. Or do you wish (when playing tetris), that the higher you get, the more features you should obtain? Positive Things like bombs, lives or earthquake which creates automaticly a gab for the damn "I" block? Negative things like enemies, or misshaped blocks which don't align (think of a triangle)? Or the other way around... imagine tetris starts just with the "o" block, nothing more. The further you play, the more different tiles you obtain, like "I" or "T" or even "Z"!!!11
I like this game because it works just as tetris. Everything which is possible can you do from the start on. No cheap tricks to keep the player motivated because the basic gamedesign lacks in depth or fun.

About the push personality. I disagree here too. You have a startscreen which tells you everything you have to know. The rest is imagination. Maybe you have a booklet which tells a story (or a small comic book like yar's revenge). The yellow robot works perfect ingame. It's easily recognizable and the nodes works perfect for what they are. I especially like the "height-marks". They come from time to time and between them the background it's dark. In my head this creates a very interesting, creepy hole.
Of course, you could make a perfect spiderman game out of this engine. The background would be a skyscraper. The nodes were enemies in windows (when you come to close to them, they use their knive and stab you, so look out!). You (spiderman) shoot your spider web against them and try to reach the roof, where your beloved girl waits (kidnapped from a villain). The highscore is the time you have to rescue her... and the best, you don't even have to make big changes in the engine... whee, new license-game! (which would make more fun than the real ones, tho) - sorry about the ranting.

[Xion]

Why are you simply a BALL?

you're piloting the yellow robot in the title screen.
Adam, in the main menu, tracks A and B are exactly the same.