Grappling Hook

User Code & Projects
121

IndieGames.com and SpeedRunGames.com arranged a competition, where you can win a free copy of Grappling Hook!



To have your chance of winning, just answer the following question:

At various points during the demo there are 3 wall tags in black letters.

What do these 3 tags say?




Give the demo a playthrough, find the 3 tags, and then email your answer to walltags@speedrungames.com.
The competition will run until Thursday evening (8/10/09). The 3 winners will be picked randomly out of the emails with the right answer.
Happy hunting!
122

Grappling Hook version 1.03 is available, both demo and full-version.




Changes Since Version 1.02:
- The bloom-shader will disable itself automatically, when it is not supported. That caused some crashes on old graphics cards in the past.
- The timer has a higher resolution.
- You can restart a level by pressing "4".
- All important keys can be configured in the keys.cfg.
- After level-loading there is a 1 second pause.
- More resolutions are supported in windowed-mode.
- Fixed a crashbug with “Disabled Sound” in Level 7.
- There is an option, that not the last checkpoint will be loaded on death, but the level will be restarted.
- Loading a checkpoint is only allowed, when the character is on ground.
- Fixed a small bug, when a mouse-keys was used for running.

Reviews:

“Grappling Hook [..] an incredible first person puzzler/platformer, a title that already is one of the best indie games released this year.
[..] the way it is right now – with short but challenging and intense levels, all smartly done, it's perfect.
As a whole, Grappling Hook is an amazing product. It is lighting fast and very challenging, it manages to deliver some really smart puzzles and oblige you act quickly. Or die.”
Calin Ciabai – Unigamesity

“Grappling Hook is a fantastic first-person puzzler which is very much in the same light as Valve’s Portal.”
Mike Rose – IndieGames.com

Quiz: Win A Free Copy Of Grappling Hook!
Don't miss your chance to win a full version of Grappling Hook!
Till now, there are 32 potential winners!

Visit the dev-blog for more information.

123

Just a comment, by having the contest be under the Windows only target audience you are missing many potential costumers.  :cry:



Cheers!

124

I've created a mac-version yesterday and fixed the last platform-dependent bugs.

Now I just have to test it on a couple of macs.

When everything works fine I will release it within the next week.

125

The wall-tag-competition is over.

Congratulations to the three winners!

Thanks to the 38 participants.



I enjoyed reading the answer-emails.

This was one of my favorites: ^^

42
Yeah!! The legendary Grappling Hook!
Are you a Spider Monkey?

I love you.

Sadly, the random-number-generator couldn't be influenced by this.
126

Grappling Hook version 1.05 is available, both demo and full-version.




Changes Since Version 1.03:
- Twitter-Integration: Grappling Hook can post your unlocked achievements to Twitter, using your account.
- Hook Device and bolts will be correctly restored after loading.
- Edges will not stop the character anymore, when he is sliding up walls.
- Fixed memory leaks.
- Tuned Virtual-Machine and Garbage Collector.
- Improved the GUI of the Launcher.
- Improved some tutorial messages.
- Improved the performance in the menu a bit.

Visit the dev-blog for more information.
127

Grappling Hook is available on Mac!

Both demo and full-version are available on Mac.

Every owner of a Grappling Hook copy can play the game on every supported platform.

When you own Grappling Hook for Windows and want to play it on your Mac, you can download the Mac version here.




8 Free Additional Levels Soon
I'm working on a free level-pack for the full game. It will be released within the next two weeks and will include 8 new, unique, and challenging levels.
Some of the new levels are entirely non-linear, so you will be free to decide, what to do next.
The new levels also feature puzzles, where you have to use the Grappling Hook in entirely new ways.

New Review
Bytejacker reviewed Grappling Hook in their latest episode:
Watch Bytejacker episode 58!
128

just played the demo of this on a mac (64 bit intel imac)…

runs perfectly…

i have to say though this is a game and a half, never mind that it was coded in jme…

absolutely loved it…

will be buying the full version of this…

just a great fun game and very addictive…

well done…

129

Thank you, ncomp. :slight_smile:

130

Today me and Christian (JackNeil) got together for an interview. Please check it out on our blog.

131

Grappling Hook Version 1.06 is available, both demo and full-version.

When you are an owner of the full version, you can download the new version here.

Your savegames will be not affected by an update.




Changes Since Version 1.05:

- Eight new levels! These levels are especially for players, who already played through the other 22 and are looking for new challenges. Some of the new levels are non-linear, so you will be free to decide, what to do next. The new levels also feature puzzles, where you have to use the Grappling Hook in entirely new ways. Of course, there are also challenges for every new level.

- The level editor is now fully functional and included in the full version of the game. It is now possible for everyone to include levels in the game, so they are selectable in the menu. A tutorial how to create new levels and how to add them to the game will be released within this week.

- The developer-mode can be enable in the game options. There will be also a hint in the HUD, when it is enabled.
- The values of the challenges for every level are now visible in the level selection screen.
- The background-size of all on-screen-messages fits now to the amount of text.
- You can switch now between hardware or software sound, when you experience any problems with one of them on your machine.
- You can choose now, if you want to visit the games website, when quitting the demo.
- Fixed a bug, that prevented the game running on 64 bit machines.
- Fixed a bug with e-mail-addresses that contained a “+”.



132

Great Work, Christian!  If only all games were maintained like this  :wink:

133

I'm glad you fought the temptation to release this as priced downloadable content, if that ever even occurred to you that is :wink: I suppose you're releasing it free because it was sort of a part of the release milestone package to begin with?

134

Someone suggested to release the new levels as priced downloadable content, but I dropped this idea after around 4 seconds. :wink:



The 22 levels are the full game and the eight new ones are true additional content. I did not cut anything for a release deadline, because there was no deadline. I released when I thought it was time to release.

It can be an advantage that you don't have to care about contracts or milestones, when you are an indie. Of course, it requires discipline, focus, and a strong vision.

Instead of milestones, design documents, and any plans I work with a simple task-list (textfile). Tasks in the future have high-level names and I split them into sub-tasks, when I work on them. This means no overhead for planning. The order of the tasks is flexible. Since the beginning of Grappling Hook the textfile has grown to a size of around 2400 lines. It gives a great feeling of achievement, when you can move 5-15 lines of the ToDo-list to the Done-list every day. :slight_smile:

Of course, the ToDo-list will also grow every day by around the same amount of tasks, when you refine the highlevel-tasks, evaluate feedback, or think about new ideas. There are always things that can/must/should be done in iterative development. Someday I'll have to decide, when to stop working on this project.



I've created the eight new levels, because I had the ideas for them and I love it. :slight_smile:

When I have more ideas for new unique levels I will release more additional levels.

135

This is getting better and better…

I enjoyed reading about your task-list, because this is exactly the same way I do it…

Only I use Mylyn, so I can quickly get back to the context of my tasks.



What kind of libraries are you using (non graphical, non physics, but purely for logic) ?



The nice thing when you work in Java is that you have enterprise strength libraries behind you. And

Eclipse of course…I'm pretty sure that the gaming world will move more and more towards Java, in the years to come.



I've found out that when your project reaches a certain size, some sort of dependency injection framework is needed, unless you want to drown in factories.

Let me advertise "Guice" from google. It has transformed my project from spagetti to hyper clean code.



At first I used Spring xml injection, but found out that it transformed the spaggeti into xml spagetti instead.

I then spend almost 4 month transffering it to Guice, an investment that came 1000 times back.



Not trying to sound besserwisser, I'm just always trying to advocate libraries that makes your life 2000 times easier.


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Baune said:

This is getting better and better..
I enjoyed reading about your task-list, because this is exactly the same way I do it..
Only I use Mylyn, so I can quickly get back to the context of my tasks.

What kind of libraries are you using (non graphical, non physics, but purely for logic) ?

The nice thing when you work in Java is that you have enterprise strength libraries behind you. And
Eclipse of course..I'm pretty sure that the gaming world will move more and more towards Java, in the years to come.

I've found out that when your project reaches a certain size, some sort of dependency injection framework is needed, unless you want to drown in factories.
Let me advertise "Guice" from google. It has transformed my project from spagetti to hyper clean code.

At first I used Spring xml injection, but found out that it transformed the spaggeti into xml spagetti instead.
I then spend almost 4 month transffering it to Guice, an investment that came 1000 times back.

Not trying to sound besserwisser, I'm just always trying to advocate libraries that makes your life 2000 times easier.


Can MyLyn also be used for non-programmer tasks? I have to try it out, because I already use Eclipse and love it.

I'm only using LWJGL as an additional library. Nothing else.

I also think Java is great for game development, but it has a bad image, because it was slow in the old days. I hope for the developers, that more will use Java for game development. But I think more people will use C#. From my point of view C# is not better. It is slower and has only partial multi-platform-support with Mono. But it has features C++ programmers like, that are not part of Java. And that is an important point, because every programmer has a history and likes to stick to habits.
137

For others task, such as "write UML diagram" or "purchase a bigger harddisk" I just use a textfile.

I have such tasks as "physics abstraction" or "Camera control" which are more like "areas"…

That way I can quickly find the files concerning these "areas" when needed.

I also list bugs in the Mylyn task list.

I'd say, it makes it alot easier, since you

dont have to look at  hundreds of java classes, just the ones your working on right now.

At my work we're working on a big website, and there are like hundreds of bugs and tasks…and thousands of files.

I'm the only one using MyLyn, and when have to check on a previous task, I just enter it's ID in the MyLyn search field,  and 5 seconds later I can start working on the about 5-10 files involved in this task.

I'm almost always working on at least 5-7 task concurrently, and Mylyn makes it easy for me to switch in between them

Highly recommendable.

138

Btw, I also have a question if you dont mind…how did you make the HUD displaying messages in your game ? (like "New personal record" etc.)


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Baune said:

Btw, I also have a question if you dont mind..how did you make the HUD displaying messages in your game ? (like "New personal record" etc.)

I've implemented a ui-system for the menu. For the HUD I'm using textured quads and text. Nothing fancy. But I modified the font-renderer a bit, so it display more characters and has configurable letter-spacing.
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I've implemented a ui-system for the menu. For the HUD I'm using textured quads and text. Nothing fancy. But I modified the font-renderer a bit, so it display more characters and has configurable letter-spacing.
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AngelCodes BitmapFont http://www.jmonkeyengine.com/forum/index.php?topic=11220.0