Glad to see another grappling game, I think we can give each other valuable feedback since we both made games with similar mechanics.
I was immediately impressed by the scope of the levels and the number of different mechanics you managed to put into the game. I really enjoyed the visual themes you went with of the dinosaur-like 'technocow' enemies and the cowboy. I was super surprised by the boss at the end. I really enjoyed the movement and grappling mechanics, most notably when I had to grapple from under a point and swing horizontally. I found grappling to points on the sides of walls to be a bit more cumbersome, but it didn't ruin my enjoyment of the game, just not the same level of wild fun movement.
I do wish the grappling were a little faster at times. I think the normal grappling along a horizontal path under a point above you is fast enough. But grappling to a point on the side of a wall (moving upwards) or bringing yourself down or up from a grapple using the arrow keys felt like it could be a bit more smooth. I can understand the design choice though to make it more gradual to allow for easier control of your positioning.
I think it made a lot of sense to include attack (left click) and defensive options (shift), although I wish that these were actually part of the grapple or jump somehow, so that the movement mechanics could be the absolute focus of the game. This is just my personal opinion, but it might have been cool to kill enemies by landing on them via grapple or jump (like Mario) or somehow using your grapple to move to and slice through an enemy very quickly (think like a katana but using a grapple to lunge forward). I also think that the jump could have just been you letting go of the grapple button and launching off of the tangent of your path, rather than having a separate jump button.
These changes would also allow you to cut down on the number of buttons the player has to use for the game to just left mouse button + WASD. I can see how each of these changes would have their own design and development challenges, but I think you could take this grappling hook foundation and push it a lot further. I think your level design indicated that the grapple was supposed to be the star of the show, but I feel that the other mechanics like the jump, attack, and especially dash distract from that.
The boss at the end was awesome in visual design and mechanics, but the health system confused me. At that point, I kept playing because I had gotten so far and I felt motivated to keep going, but the health bar seemed to keep going white. I wasn't sure if this was a glitch, or a design decision of the boss going invincible temporarily. I had noticed the same thing with enemies, but I had been able to bypass them by grappling away. In the case of the boss, I kept trying to grapple and attack. Eventually my game crashed with the bug below:
############################################################################################
ERROR in
action number 1
of Step Event0
for object obj_camera:
Variable obj_camera.camera_v(100135, -2147483648) not set before reading it.
at gml_Object_obj_camera_Step_0
############################################################################################
gml_Object_obj_camera_Step_0 (line -1)
I think that you could benefit from adding hit stop and camera shake to your game, for when the player gets hurt and for when enemies get hurt, to really empasize the impact of the hits. Camera shake can be achieved like so in Unity, I'm not sure how it would be in the engine you used: https://imgur.com/a/rWEMD0U
And hitstop can be achieved like so:
- set Time.timeScale = 0f; or 0.2f or some value close to 0, below 1.
- wait 0.2 seconds or so, unscaled time
- set Time.timeScale back to 1f (normal time progression)
I would be happy to playtest the game if you get an updated build. I would also really appreciate it if you could check out my game and give me feedback as well, since we both made grappling games.