By: Autumn Wright, Zack Wilson, Ben Coukos-Wiley, Ethan Ball, Evan Yoshitani
Grapple Gaiden is a speedrunning-focused 2D action-platformer in which you try to complete levels as quickly and flawlessly as you can through a variety of advanced movement techniques. Your main tool is your grappling hook, which allows you to quickly pull yourself towards enemies and grapple points. As you grapple towards something, you are given a variety of traversal options:
- Attack-cancel to exit the grapple, retaining your momentum and allowing you to kill an enemy in your path of travel.
- Jump-cancel to exit the grapple, losing a significant amount of momentum but diverting your trajectory up and over any obstacles in your path.
- Finish the grapple, clinging to the grapple point until you either drop off or choose a direction to launch yourself in.
The game also has a number of hazards and grapple point variants to keep the player on their toes. Turrets, for example, begin to track you once they spot you and eventually fire a laser at your previous position. Some grapple points don't allow you to cling to them and instead either immediately fling you in your current direction of travel or just drop you beneath them.
The game was programmed in C# using the MonoGame library and Visual Studio. There is also a level editor we designed and integrated into the game that we used to design all of our levels and playtest any new mechanics or game objects. A fair amount of the art and music was done by one of our group members, Zack Wilson, and the rest was pulled from free online sources.
My role in the project was the design director. I was responsible for managing our ideas for features and mechanics and keeping them all in scope for our time frame. I also implemented many of these design decisions, mostly focused around the player's movement and the many hazards and grapple points they have to interact with. I also designed levels 3-5 in the game's campaign.
Perhaps the most challenging part of development was when universities shut down due to COVID and everyone had to move out. Our schedule was tightened, and we could no longer work together in the lab. We still managed ourselves well, however, arranging weekly meetings and keeping our progress tracker up-to-date.
