Grapple Fishing

"Help Pingino win the Fish Catcher's Toolkit fishing jam by using your grapple hook."

The game was made in Lua in the LÖVE Framework. It was made for the GMTK Game Jam 2021.

I used to watch all of GMTK's videos on repeat over and over before I got a PC for making games. Therefore, this jam was very special, also because it was my first.

Gameplay Overview

The game plays like a typical tile sliding game where the player can only move along a grid and will move all the way to a wall in one go. However, the unique difference here is that the player has a grappling hook, which means that, for some tiles, the player pulls tiles towards themselves instead of pulling themselves towards it.

The game is a series of puzzles which slowly develop new mechanics over time.

• Start: the player is simply moving around tiles to get to the goal.

• Blocks: the player is then introduced to blocks which serve as an obstacle which prevents the player from being able to move. However, the player can also use this to pull the fish towards themselves.

• Pipes: introduced at nearly the same time is pipes, which allows the grapple hook to go through but nothing else. This means that the player can grapple blocks, but it will not be pulled all the way to them.

• Keys and Locks: introduced as the final mechanic, keys can be pulled and locks act like pipes, allowing the hook to pass through. This means that the player has to pull keys through the lock in order to unlock them and allow passage.

Overall, this game is quite good and did well in the game jam, coming in the top 13% of games in terms of the fun rating, and the top 30% overall, making a big loss on the game's originality score.