Possible bug: I heard no sound despite the FMOD credits.
I liked the concepts and the visual presentation. The hookshot felt annoyingly limited. I was constantly aiming at the next dune, only for the hookshot to fall short. I also tried to shoot the hookshot at the biggest thing on the map, my crashed ship, and it wouldn't work. Suggestions (ALWAYS take suggestions on fixes from players with a grain of salt) :
- If the player can see it, the player can hookshot it.
- If the player clicks the hookshot button, raycast from the reticle. Wherever it hits is where the hookshot arrow is going to hit.
- If it takes too long for the hookshotarrow to travel that distance, have it snap to its destination after the arrow has traveled the current maximum "button held down" travel time of a typical hookshot attempt.
- If the thing it hit is too far away to do the whole "reel in" effect, just give the player a speed boost in that general direction, then the cable "snaps" and the player can hookshot again.
- If the cable can't be drawn for some reason, due to hills covering up the destination or whatever, same thing. Cable snaps, you travel the direction you were trying to use the hookshot to travel anyway.
- If the spaceship is off-limits because hookshotting onto it "isn't fun" or "breaks the game" or whatever, bury the ship halfway in the sand so it's just another domed hill, mechanically speaking.
Overall: game concept feels good, but hookshotting feels bad. If hookshotting was fun, this could become a good core mechanic to build an experience around.
Edit: If the purpose of the hookshot is just to steer, not to go fast, then you need to teach the player how to go fast. I was schlepping up hills and snowboarding down them, until I discovered the hookshot, and that's apparently not fast enough to not get eaten by a worm.
Edit: I tried to play again, thinking maybe I'd start with a good burst of speed, then use the hookshot to change direction, shalomming back and forth to avoid the worm through agility, not raw speed. Then I thought maybe the hookshot was only meant to climb hills, not for use on flat ground. Then I thought maybe I needed to have the snowboard already out when the hookshot latches on, for maximum speed.
In all possible scenarios, it didn't do what I thought it would do. It was like the laws of physics were just constantly changing to make me slow down and get eaten in a ditch, no matter what I did, no matter how the snowboard reacted at the start of the game.
This thing is frame-rate independent, right? You're using delta-time, not raw update cycles or something, right? Because without frame-rate independence, things like friction and momentum are going to end up being completely different on different user's machines in a physics-driven game like this.