It’s been decided! With 45% of you voting for the Grappling Hook on Discord!

The next step is determining what purpose the grappling hooks will have in the game and how many mechanics we can add that revolve around it.

For the time being, I’m adding three main functions to the grapple hook:

• Swinging: Hook on to a fixed node and swing.

• Grapple: Hook on to a surface, node, or enemy and pull yourself towards it at high speed.

• Pull: Hook on to an object or enemy and pull it towards you.

I’m going with physics-based movement at the moment, but we can always swap to fixed motion in the future if the physics don’t feel right.

As for the swinging: I’m allowing for two modes:

• Ratcheting: Your “rope” can get shorter as you get closer to the swinging node, but it does not get longer. This means the rope’s tension always affect your swinging arc.

• Loose: Your “rope” is of a fixed-length determined by your initial distance from the node when you hooked onto it. This means the tension only affects your swinging when you are at the threshold of that length (think of it like a ball attached to a rope).

I could also add a more rigid mode where the “rope” is of a fixed length like the Loose mode, but you are always at that distance and always affected by the tension (think of this like a ball attached to a steel rod rather than a rope).

And instead of deciding on which mode works best, we could have different types of hookshoots you switch between that have different modes and functionalities.

More on this as I experiment!

And if you’d like to suggest ideas, you can subscribe to &REWDAVID+ on Patreon to join our future brainstorming sessions!