Grapple Game (Placeholder name)
March 2023 - April 2023
Grapple Game was a singleplayer arena FPS that focused on grabbling and melee combat.
You would use your grappling gun to swing, pull and launch yourself.
You would also use your deadly broom to swipe enemies in half and also parry enemy attacks (which was taken from Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance).
Not near enough to hit them? Then you would melt them with your water nozzle! A device that somehow shoots drops of extremely hot water that melts metal.
One feature of your grappling abilities that I really liked was the launch mechanic. Basically, you were able to launch yourself opposite of the grappled point and gain massive speed! It was tons of fun!
The story of the game would be that you would play as a janitor who worked at a company which fired him and replaced him with cleaning robots robots and he gets angry so he goes on a journey to swipe through robots and defeat the company's CEO.
The plot was a bit ridiculous but also kinda funny at the same time. I am still not sure how to feel about it.
DEVELOPMENT
Development actually began exactly on January 15th 2023 as an "escape from stress" project. I won't explain what happened around that time.
However, I do have the original video of the game on that day!
One weird thing that I thankfully changed was needing to stop all velocity to be able to launch of yourself. I had it because of how the grapple hook works in-lore (it petrifies the rope and pushes it towards the ground so the character gets the opposite force towards him to launch himself) but it wasn't fun so I changed it.
The game was left in this state for quite a while, until I remembered it in March of the same year and decided to make it into a full game.
Originally, there would be no combat! I was thinking of making a game that was just going from point A to point B.
But then I found out that there was already a parkour game about grappling.
So, filled with panic, I decided to add combat to it.
I did not particularly wanted to add guns, as it would make the game another ULTRAKILL clone (despite taking heavy inspiration from it). So I made it focused on melee combat, with the water nozzle being added later for airborne enemies.
I did not had a clear vision of the story. One idea was that you would play as a king in probably a medieval timeline who would do stuff to achieve something. But then I thought of the aforementioned story.
But development continued on!
However, problems arised with the gameplay: it was too much like ULTRAKILL.
To combat this, I implemented a score system which you would use to buy... stuff. I did not know what you would use the score for.
I eventually removed that and instead added a Heat Meter, which works exactly like Pizza Tower's original Heat Meter mechanic (before it was changed and then removed from the final game).
But things kept going! And eventually, a particular milestone was finally met: all fundamental mechanics were implemented!
They were imperfect and would most likely get rewritten had the game not died, but that at least gave me the oppoturnity to finally work on actual enemies and levels!
However, after designing the first level, my motivation dramatically fell. I realized that the game was just a worse ULTRAKILL and I was not actually willing to make a game of this size.
So I just stopped working on it and started exploring other ideas...
If I were to come back to thier project (extremely unlikely), I would give the whole game an overhaul. The combat was just not fun.
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